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Success rates in the low back when patients need a fusion more come down to, I think, surgical decision making than the fusion itself. If someone tells you you need a fusion, I think it’s very important to get a second opinion and go see a surgeon who’s really gonna think through the process and try and tailor the surgery specifically for the individual to try to do the minimum, to get that patient better while still having a quality of life.

Sometimes you have to restrict patients that have had multi-level lumbar fusions in their activity. In general, once somebody heals, pain is more their guide than anything else. So if they feel fine, they can do whatever they want.

For most patients that have had surgery in their neck, they have very little in the way of limitations once they’ve healed. And they can range from none to just common sense precautions.

One of the things I found helpful in my practice for patients that are understandably concerned or or hesitant to have surgery is when possible to give them an opportunity to talk to one of my patients who has had a similar surgery in the past, ideally recently, and then they can go over and discuss what their experiences were like.

And often if they see a patient in in the office who just had surgery a couple weeks before and is walking around, fine, obviously sometimes with pain, that sets a lot of their fears at ease.

Surgery in the neck, when performed from the front, and patients only need one or two levels, is one of the most successful surgeries of all surgeries performed. What that means is after a patient typically has a herniated disc in the neck that ultimately they need surgery for, if years later they get another herniated disc.

It’s very common for them, even though they were initially very scared about surgery, to want to proceed to surgery very quickly simply because it’s usually a quick outpatient procedure with a high success rate.