Category: General Questions

Back and neck pain for active adults over 50 is very common. Usually, not much intervention is needed other than supportive care, such as over-the-counter medications and physical therapy. Occasionally, it’s more than that, and if it’s more than that, an MRI comes into play to find out exactly what’s going on.

One of the things I’ve found that I think I probably do better than most surgeons in addressing complex cases is having a forward-looking view of treating the patient as they come to me with the situation they’re in. I haven’t found that there’s much value in looking back and second-guessing what should have been done previously, but rather working with how they are today and trying to get them better from that point.

Patients with really severe symptoms can pose challenges, especially if they’re medical reasons where they can’t have surgery. But as a general rule, the more severe the symptoms, the more surgery becomes an option.

There are a lot of horror stories about spine surgery out there, and some of them are justified, but the reality is some of the surgical procedures in spine, such as one or two-level neck surgery, minimally invasive back surgery, have extraordinarily high success rates, higher than most other surgical procedures.

So while it’s scary, you can read horror stories on the internet, as a general rule, spine surgery has a very high success rate and very low complication rate within certain parameters, of course.

Generally, when patients have failed everything other than surgery, it’s time to talk about surgery. And usually I approach it by getting to know them on their initial visits where we’re treating them conservatively and early on laying down the treatment pathway, in case they don’t get better from more conservative treatment.