Back Pain Solution (eBook)

A Patient's Guide to Laser Spine Surgery, Minimally Invasive Procedures, an

Michael Hasz (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
190 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-0838-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Millions of people every year experience back pain. In the past, major surgery was often their only recourse. But today, for 80 to 90 percent of back pain sufferers, long-term relief no longer has to involve complicated medical procedures, extended hospital stays, and weeks of recovery. In this informative, user-friendly guide, renowned spine surgeon Dr. Michael Hasz explores options for eliminating back pain without surgery or with minimally invasive surgery. The treatment choices he covers range from weight loss and exercise, to acupuncture and injections, to recent developments in regenerative and stem cell therapies. In addition, he details the most accurate and up-to-date diagnostics, as well as the evolution in laser technology, which has led to more accurate and effective surgeries. There's no need to suffer any longer. This invaluable resource will help you make the right decisions about procedures and lifestyle, and point you down the path to being pain-free.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

1. Getting to Pain-Free

My patient John had a long and circuitous path to curing his back pain—it took him around the world until it ended in my office in Virginia. John was a very successful businessman in his seventies. He was still active in his company and traveled a lot for business. He also made plenty of time to enjoy his hobbies of competitive ice dancing and mountain climbing. Unfortunately, pinched nerves in the lumbar (lower back) section of his spine, caused by arthritis and scoliosis, were severely hampering his activities.

John came to see me because he was searching for a solution to his constant pain. I told him we could do surgery on his entire spine, but it would have a long recovery period and leave him with very little flexibility. His ice dancing days would be over. I also told him that a smaller, much less invasive surgery that could help quite a bit was also possible. He listened carefully and then went searching the world for more opinions. He went to Baltimore to consult with some famous sports doctors. He went to Switzerland and got opinions there. He went to doctors in Germany. He came back to me, and I repeated what I told him before. After that, he went to another doctor and had a surgery that didn’t help.

Finally, he came back to me and we went ahead with the minimally invasive surgery (MIS) I had originally proposed. He was better in two weeks. He was back to ice dancing at six weeks. Three months after that, he sent me a picture of himself on top of a mountain. He and his wife noted that he stood taller and that he felt and looked younger. He still feels this way years later.

John is a bit out of the ordinary in his ability to travel the world, seeking opinions on his back pain, but in other respects, he’s very typical of my patients. They’ve been in constant pain from spinal issues for a long time, they’ve tried other solutions, sometimes including surgery, and then they come to me. I do a minimally invasive procedure, relieve their pain, and have them back on their feet and back to their life within a few weeks.

To understand why, we need to back up a little.

The Upper End of the Curve

The average medical student gets about an hour of nutrition training during their schooling. That’s what I got, too, but something I learned in that hour stayed with me. I was told that the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for nutrients is designed by a committee so that the majority of healthy people who get that amount will avoid disease. That completely spun me around. Before that, I thought that if you got the RDA, you’d be healthy. But the RDA doesn’t optimize health—it just helps you avoid disease. That’s something completely different. I’m not into avoiding disease. I’m into optimizing health.

What the RDA Means

The Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences (a nongovernment, nonprofit organization), sets the national guidelines for adequate dietary intake of nutrients. The board sets the research-based Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for nutrients. The RDA is defined as the average daily level of intake sufficient to meet the nutrient requirements of nearly all (at least 97 percent) healthy people. In other words, it sets the minimum amount to avoid deficiencies, not the amount for optimal health or the amounts for people who aren’t healthy.

I wanted to learn to be at the upper end of the bell curve, where people are healthiest. I didn’t want to be just in the middle and certainly not at the lower end.

The science of optimal health drew me in. I still vividly remember browsing through the library stacks when I was in medical school and running across a book by someone who described the benefits of interval training and high-intensity exercise—thirty years before CrossFit and other fitness programs became the rage. The same thing happened with fish oil. Researchers thirty years ago were describing the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, but fish oil supplements didn’t really exist. The researchers could only recommend eating sardines and anchovy sandwiches.

As a surgeon, I continued to follow the research in the realms of nutrition and human performance. I became convinced that nutrition is key to avoiding and healing spine problems. In my practice today as a spine surgeon, I find that most people can get better nonoperatively if they do the right exercises, lose weight, and change their diet. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I realize that I didn’t recommend a single patient for surgery. They were all getting better with nonoperative approaches.

For those who need more help, we offer medication, injections, stem cells, and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) treatments. I usually see surgery as a last resort, used only when other treatments haven’t helped. When it is needed, I almost always do it with minimally invasive techniques and advanced technology. I was one of the first surgeons on the east coast to use artificial discs for lower back surgery. I was also one of the first to use stem cells and robotic surgery.

The surgery I did on John was a direct lateral interbody fusion. One of his discs had collapsed. Using just a three-inch incision on his side, I was able to remove the damaged disc and replace it with an artificial one. The procedure is similar to putting in a shim. This opened a space for the nerve, took away the leg pain, and realigned part of the spine to give him better balance. The key was figuring out exactly where the artificial disc should go.

John was in the hospital for just a few days. In the old days, he would have been in bed for three months or would have had a plaster cast from his knees to his armpits and would have had a much bigger surgery. Today, we hold the fused discs in place with tiny screws that stabilize it. My patients are generally up and walking by the next day, and often the same day. As soon as the incision heals, they start physical therapy. In John’s case, that was water rehab, so he could exercise with less pressure on the spine. From there, he graduated to regular physical therapy that focused on building his muscles and getting his core back in shape.

Insurance Coverage

Health insurance doesn’t always cover some of the procedures I do. Even though they’re safe and very effective, they’re on the cutting edge (so to speak), and there haven’t been enough formal studies to make the insurance companies always have to pay for them. That’s a problem because the cost can be high. But the cost of not doing the surgery can be high, too. I have a patient who started her own business after retiring from the military. After seven or eight years of struggling, the company is now doing very well. She has 350 employees and revenues of over $30 million. She was in a lot of pain and needed the sort of surgery that would get her back to running the company quickly, but her insurer wasn’t willing to pay for it. She told me to put her on the operating room schedule, because as a CEO, she knew that sometimes you have to put your health first and just pay the bill. In the end, after surgery, she was able to negotiate with her insurer for reimbursement. She was back at work a week after the surgery; three months later she was completely pain-free.

Getting Your Life Back

I keep a picture of Ginny in her wedding dress in my office. When she first came to me, she was twenty-six and had been in miserable back pain for several years. She could barely get up from the couch, much less get to class or to work. Her social life was nonexistent. The doctors she saw couldn’t figure out why her back hurt so much. They also told her that even if they could, she was too young for spine surgery.

She came to me for help. We tried nonoperative approaches for a year, but they didn’t help much. I ended up testing her discs and found that three of them had big tears, even though MRIs didn’t show any herniations. We talked about what to do. She said, “Everybody else says I’m too young for surgery. They want me to wait twenty years, and then they’ll think about doing it. I’m already twenty-six. They want me to give up another half of my life while I wait for something that might help.” We decided to go ahead with fusion surgery. It went very well—Ginny was pain-free and active again for the first time in years.

The next time I saw Ginny was about eighteen months later. She was off her pain meds, active, married, and six months pregnant. She told me, “Before I had surgery, I basically went to doctor’s visits, therapy, and home. I couldn’t do anything more. After surgery, within a few months, I was up and around and able to spend time with my friends. I got back to school and ended up meeting my husband.” Why was she in my office? She wanted to know if the surgery affected her ability to have a normal delivery. I told her it didn’t, and she wouldn’t need an elective C-section. Back surgery turned Ginny from a depressed hermit back into a vibrant young woman with an active life ahead of her.

And then there’s the problem of depression....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.4.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-0838-7 / 1544508387
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-0838-2 / 9781544508382