According to the National Center for Health Statistics, over 55% of American adults live with pain, with back pain being the most prevalent. Acute or chronic pain levels that you experience in your back may be due to an injury, sleep deprivation, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, depression, anxiety, and stress. If you have severe pain in your back, you should go to your doctor for Dayton back surgery. A chronically painful back can detrimentally affect the quality of your life. Constant debilitating pain can cause a serious emotional problem for you, and thus you may often be angry, depressed, anxious, and have mood swings.
Back pain can also affect your quality of life by reducing your ability to be highly productive, affecting your appetite, decreasing your mobility, affecting your sleep, and impairing your cognitive function.
Consequently, below are a few other things you need to remember about back surgery.
1. The right candidate for back surgery
You may be the right candidate for back surgery when you have pain that does not go away, radiates to your legs and arms, or severe symptoms and trauma accompany your pain. A long-lasting pain lasts for several weeks or months and may make it harder for you to sit, stand, walk, sleep, or lie down.
The good news is that more than 75% of back pains disappear within a few weeks.
When you have back pain that travels to your arms or legs, that indicates that the spine’s nerve root is under unhealthy pressure. The pain in your back that reaches your hands and legs may be due to bone spurs or disk herniation.
Other conditions that may cause severe back pain are spinal narrowing, vertebral damage, cervical myelopathy, and degenerative disk disease.
2. It is best to avoid back surgery
Your doctor may help you avoid back surgery since almost every surgical procedure has risks and complications.
For instance, back surgery will require a longer recovery and likely cause complications like bleeding, blood clots, infections, and acceleration of healthy vertebrae degeneration. Blood clotting from surgical procedures in your back can affect your heart or lungs and cause a stroke or heart attack.
Moreover, according to research, your back surgery has a 20% to 40% chance of being unsuccessful. Because you have a high probability of your back surgery not working, there is even a medical term to describe the situation. According to the International Association for the Study of Pain, failed back surgery syndrome is persistent leg or back pain after surgery.
Therefore, your doctor will first recommend that you undergo conservative or minimally invasive treatments to address your back pain. Non-surgical treatments that can help relieve your back pain and discomfort may include physical therapy, inflammation-reducing medications, or steroid injections.
3. Types of back surgery
Common types of back surgery your surgeon may recommend for you are spinal fusion, plasma disk decompression, and spinal decompression.
For example, a plasma disk decompression called nucleoplasty involves inserting a needle into a disk, causing back pain.
Your surgeon then inserts a plasma laser device into the needle and heats the tip, vaporizing the tissue in your disk. As a result, the disk size reduces, which relieves pressure on adjacent spinal nerves.
Contact Vertrae® today to schedule an appointment with a back surgery specialist.
