Category: General Questions

When a patient makes a decision to have surgery, the next step is to arrange scheduling, and that involves working with them on time and location, getting the surgery scheduled. Very often patients need preoperative clearance, which means going to an urgent care, seeing their primary care doctor to make sure they’re okay for surgery.

A lot of my patients are understandably anxious or afraid of surgery. I think one of the ways to address that is just take time to discuss with the surgeon your fears, potential outcomes, and potential risks, and develop a comfort level with that surgeon that they’re there to address those fears and, and help you through them if unexpected things happen.

I think, in terms of the latest advancements of spine surgery, the single biggest impact is, has been the cervical disc replacement. Although it’s been out for a fairly long time now, we’ve had in our hands long enough to see that it really is a viable competitor for their more traditional procedure, which is a fusion with encouraging evidence to show that it may overall be a better procedure than a fusion, which was already an excellent procedure.

Patients often ask me how they’re going to do long-term after their spine surgery. Sometimes we know and sometimes we don’t know. We just don’t have a lot of data on patients 10, 20, 30 years after surgery. The goal certainly is to give somebody back their quality of life in a tailored fashion. That’s nuanced and requires input of thought on the surgeon to do the minimum surgical intervention to get them where they need to be and, and minimize at the same time, the risk for future surgery.

I think the most important questions a patient can ask a spine surgeon or any surgeon, comes down to expectations and outcomes. If you can have a candid discussion with your surgeon about risks and benefits and what are reasonable expectations of outcomes, and you feel that he’s being honest with you and not trying to sell you on a procedure that’s generally a good indication that he’s someone or she’s someone that you can trust to do the best job possible for you.