Category: General Questions

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.

I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. I do think muscle problems do cause a lot of back problems, but there’s so many other things that come into play.

There are degenerative changes. There’s acute or chronic mild trauma or severe trauma, and it can manifest in so many different ways, whether it’s back pain, sciatica. So there’s a lot more than just this muscle or that muscle doing too much or too little