LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

spinal surgery

Mesa Chiropractor Vs. Lumbar Disc Herniations Surgery

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HOW CAN WE SAVE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF $$$ ON LUMBAR DISC HERNIATIONS??

Chiropractic care in Mesa has been shown to be effective in case control and clinical studies to be an effective option for chronic and acute low back pain.  Numerous studies have shown that, if Mesa chiropractic care is the FIRST (rather than the last!!) point of entry for any musculoskeletal complaint, the cost savings are tremendous (upwards of 30%).  Looking at this study, we can begin to see how chiropractic care is a net SAVINGS, not a net expense.  Sometimes legislators have a hard time seeing this.  Researchers looked at the costs for services prior to lumbar discectomy and chiropractic care was a measly 2% of overall costs.  Based on what we know, if more people selected chiropractic care as a point of entry (driving chiropractic costs up to maybe 30%), we’d see a massive savings in the overall amount of money spent.

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Surgery for Lumbar Degenerative Disc? How About Doing it a 2nd Time?

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The decision to undergo any type of spinal surgery is a difficult one for everyone.  But what if you had to consider not one, but a SECOND surgery as well?

Turns out, there is a large chance this may be the case.  (Spoiler alert: I’m a chiropractor whose main goal is to keep patients out of surgery)

First of all, the realities.  If I had a dollar for every time someone told me he or she had lumbar degenerative disc problems and was going to avoid surgery at all costs, I’d be doing this post from my own island in the Caribbean.

Most of those who informed me of this goal have that tone of inevitability to the voice.  Like there is no other option except to delay the surgery.  This could not be further from the truth.  I just had a conversation yesterday with a young doctor who informed me that he had L5-S1 disc degeneration and would love to be more active in the martial arts to try to stabilize his spine and avoid surgery, but every time he tried to train, it flared up his low back.

This doctor had not tried seeing a chiropractor competent in advanced soft tissue techniques that has a high likelihood of giving him almost complete relief.  So of course I gave him some resources to find a doctor who might be able to help.  There is no guarantee that this would help, but it would be foolhardy to even consider surgery without trying.

But what about all those other patients who incorrectly think there are no other options?  The ones who stress about whether or not to have surgery on his or her low back?  This decision alone is challenging.

But what if the risks of having to have a second surgery were high enough so that this same contemplative patient really needs to be deciding if he or she can undergo TWO surgeries, not just one?

You know I wouldn’t be asking this question if it didn’t have anything to do with this particular study.

In it, researchers looked at the risk of having a second surgery when the first one was done for stable (without a spondylolistethesis) lumbar disc degeneration over the next five years.  Here’s what they found:

  1. The resurgery rate was 4.7% at 3 months,
  2. 7.2% at 1 year,
  3. 9.4% at 2 years,
  4. 11.2% at 3 years,
  5. 12.5% at 4 years,
  6. 14.2% at 5 years.
  7. Based on this trajectory, they calculated a reoperation rate of 22.9% at 10 years.
  8. Reoperation rate was not different between decompression and fusion surgeries.

Wow.  Over a 1 in 5 chance you’re going to have to go under the knife a second time, with all the additional costs, downtime and rehab.  Worse—outcomes after a second surgery are worse than after the first surgery.

Not a rosy picture.  But heck—don’t see a chiropractor—we’re all quacks and dangerous to boot.

 

Maine Study Challenges Major Assumptions About Spine Care – (07-17-00)

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Maine Study Challenges Major Assumptions About Spine Care

Very interesting article. The success of spinal surgery is higher in the areas of the country with the lowest rates of surgery. And, based on the facts that the rates of surgery vary widely across the country, and yet patient presentations do not, are many patients getting unnecessary and unsuccessful surgeries??

The Back Letter 14(12):133,140, 1999 When two surgeons in Boston and Paris perform disc surgery on similar patients using similar techniques, will the results be similar? What about two surgeons in Boston and New York? Or two surgeons in Maine? The answer may be surprising. One of the most provocative spine studies of 1999 didn’t get a lot of headlines. It didn’t offer new diagnostic technology or promise miracle cures. Yet the study challenges central assumptions about spine care and recommends major changes in the way specialists conduct their practices. The study found that patients in areas of Maine with higher surgery rates had inferior outcomes to patients in areas with lower surgery rates. The reason? It appeared that surgeons in the areas with lower surgical rates had more stringent selection criteria for spine surgery. Yet the surgeons in these areas did not appear to have any inkling that they were practising their specialty differently. “Before presentation of the results of the current study, surgeons in each of the three areas [of Maine] believed that they operated on patients with similar indications and that they produced similar outcomes,” according to Robert B. Keller et al.