Who Should Go for the Spinal Fusion Surgery?
Spinal fusion procedure decreases your back pain, increases mobility, and prevents neurological problems like numbness or weakness. It can preserve and restores your spine balance, its alignment, posture, and stability, effectively in the least invasive way possible.
Sure it can give a new lease of life for patients suffering from chronic back pain for years.
But does that mean everyone must choose the surgery to relieve the back pain? , No.
Though Spinal fusion is an effective surgical procedure, it also happens to be the most over-prescribed surgical operations in the world today. In the majority of the back pain cases, Spine Specialists recommend conservative non-surgical options like pain medications, chiropractic care, physical therapy sessions, epidural steroid injections, back braces to help you get rid of the back pain. It is only when these non-surgical options fail to curb the back pain and restore the spine health, spinal fusion surgery has resorted.
What is Spinal Fusion Surgery and who is the right candidate for it?
The majority of the chronic back pain conditions are caused by the abnormal movement of the small bones of the spine, vertebrae. This abnormal vertebrae movement can destabilize the spine, damage the alignment causing chronic back pain and a slew of development problems drastically reducing the quality of life of patients. And the Spinal fusion surgery is performed by the spinal surgeons to get rid of this back pain by fusing the two or more vertebrae as one strong bone using bone graft and surgical hardware. This process stabilizes and aligns the spine, restores the disc space, and prevents further damage to the spinal cord and nerves.
Who should go for Spinal Fusion?
Spinal Fusion is considered the treatment procedure for Scoliosis, Spondylolisthesis, Degenerative disk diseases, Spinal stenosis, Spinal fractures & tumours, Herniated disk & Spinal deformities. But whether spinal fusion is the perfect treatment for you or not, depends upon several factors that your spine specialist will discuss with you in detail. In general, spinal fusion surgery is recommended if:
- The back pain is chronic.
- If the spinal condition is caused by the abnormal movement of two or three vertebrae.
- Other non-surgical treatment options like physical therapy, braces, and medications were not able to show any further improvements in the condition.
- Spinal fusion surgery is the only option that can improve the quality of life of the patient.
Though spinal fusion is the most effective treatment to get rid of chronic back pain, spinal surgeons in U.K or any other part of the world for that matter recommend non-surgical treatment options to cure the back pain. In case these non-surgical options fall short of improving the condition, spinal fusion is always the next best option.
Conclusion
Today’s spinal fusion procedures offer a minimally invasive way to surgically fuse the vertebrae to get rid of the pain in least possible time. There are only a few spinal specialists in U.K with extensive experience and expertise in performing minimally invasive spinal fusion surgeries and Dr. Jwalant Mehta is one of them.