Category: General Questions

In most cases, what determines surgical intervention is what the patient is experiencing. Their pain levels and lack of response to non-surgical treatment is typically what drives surgery. And then how their symptoms match their MRI findings can also be a factor in determining the role and timing of surgery.

So most of my patients will get better with physical therapy and/or chiropractic treatment. They may not be 100% better, but usually they’re good enough where the next step for getting injections such as epidurals isn’t worth it to them.

Injections make sense really when somebody didn’t respond to physical therapy or chiropractic. Generally, if someone’s getting better I don’t recommend injections and let them just continue to get better. If someone’s getting worse symptomatically, obviously barring certain specific examples, generally injections are a good next step.

I don’t know where he’s getting these stats from. They seem kind of made up to me.

I mean, I guess what he’s saying could be true. It depends how you define a problem. Do they have changes on their X-ray? Almost everybody does, you know, start to get over 40. Is that a problem to the patient? Not at, not at these percentages.

Most patients come in, if they’ve had no real treatment and they have neck or back pain, typically we go over their history and examine them, and assuming there’s no real warning signs for the need for emergency evaluation, generally we start with physical therapy or chiropractic treatment.

The trend now is to get an MRI fairly early, as they’re readily available. They’re no longer very expensive, and there’s no radiation with an MRI, so it can help guide treatment early rather than later.