Category: General Questions

A lot of my male patients come to me with back or neck pain, particularly back pain, and are concerned about their sexual function because it suffers. It can suffer for two reasons. One, pain itself can cause problems with sexual function. The other is, has an anatomic basis in that pressure on the nerves in the lower lumbar region can impair sexual function, so it has to be taken into consideration in treating any patient particularly male patients.

Degenerative disc disease is a very common problem that involves, often the drying out of discs, the collapse of discs and bone spurring. It can be a source of pain in patients that needs to be addressed. It can also be a latent condition that is not a problem, but gets aggravated by some type of traumatic event, and then all of a sudden somebody who had degenerative disease without a problem has a serious problem. So it needs to be recognized when it occurs by the surgeon so that he or she can take it into account when treating the patient’s condition.

When patients with osteoporosis need bigger surgery, it also has to be taken into account because if patients with osteoporosis need some type of spine implant, it very commonly needs supplemental fixation or additional consideration by an experienced surgeon to make sure that the spine implants hold properly in the soft bone.

A lot of times patients come to me saying that they’ve had, say, a botched surgery with another surgeon and they’re very scared of another surgery, and that’s very reasonable. The important thing that I found is to be patient with that, that individual. Explain to ’em as best you can, what’s going on, the risk and benefits of proceeding forward.

One of the things I pull upon is what I would do for myself or a loved one in the same situation, and that’s often how we come to a decision to perform more surgery or not with a patient.

Osteoporosis is just the word that means softening of the bones. The risk in the spine involves spontaneous compression fractures or spine fractures that occur without any kind of incident or, spine fractures that occur with very minor incidents, such as a mild fall.