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Tennis players, golf, pickleball, all those sports involve twisting, which can be hard on the spine, and it’s not uncommon for them to aggravate or exacerbate some normal underlying degenerative changes, and generally need short-term supportive care and participation of long-term home exercise program so that they can help avoid those problems in the future

Recovery varies from surgery for most patients. Most of my surgery is performed outpatient now, so most patients go home the same day. So recovery isn’t a major issues for a lot of the surgeries I perform. Obviously, there’s no way to avoid pain with surgery, but generally, most of what I do, recovery is fairly quick.

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.