Although you will be meeting with a spinal surgeon, it is important to know that surgery will not be needed to successfully treat many spinal conditions. Spinal treatments include:
- Core muscle rehabilitation – can help strengthen the spine and supporting structures
- Pain relief medication (analgesia)
- Spinal injections – these contain an anaesthetic and steroid and may be diagnostic or therapeutic
- Surgery – there are number of spinal operations that can be carried out, the most common are described below.
Minimally invasive spinal surgery is carried out for a number of spinal conditions. With smaller cuts required, pain and bleeding are reduced, recovery is faster, and scarring is kept to a minimum.
A discectomy is normally carried out when a slipped disc is compressing a nerve. A small part of the disc is surgically removed in order to resolve the problem. This operation is done under general anaesthetic with open surgery.
Alternatively, a slipped disc may be treated with a percutaneous discectomy. Carried out under sedation, a large needle is inserted into the disc using X-ray guidance and a laser then used to destroy the affected area. As no incisions are made, there is no scarring.
If your spinal canal has narrowed (this is known as spinal stenosis), a vertebral laminectomy / spinal decompression may be carried out if nerves have become compressed in the spine. This may involve a discectomy, a laminectomy, a spinal fusion, or often a combination of all three.
Vertebroplasty involves injecting a special cement into a fractured vertebra. This is often used to treat pain caused by osteoporotic fractures in the spine.
Spinal fusion can help relieve severe back pain where other treatments have not been effective. It may be carried out for the lumbar spine (lower back) or cervical spine (neck). The vertebrae have screws placed into them and are then fixed together with rods and bone grafts placed around the joints (these bone grafts fuse to the vertebrae over time, restricting movement in the spine). Although benefits are often felt within a few weeks, the bone grafts will take 6 – 12 months to fully fuse.