Spinal Fusion Surgery and Its Advantage
When a spine specialist recommends a spinal fusion surgery for a felt and chronic back pain, it is, basically, to stop the constant and painful movements of two bone vertebrae clashing against each other, affecting nearby nerves, ligaments, and even muscles, thus causing so much discomfort, such that with spinal fusion surgery, the two bone vertebrae will be fused by joining two or more vertebrae into one single structure, so that they will be prevented from moving like they used to. To determine the cause of back pains, the patient concerned needs to go through a series of tests to fully check accurately which suspected spinal problem is causing the chronic discomfort, since there are specific causes, as studied in medicine, which can be remedied by spinal fusion and these causes are: when the space between the spinal disks have narrowed causing the painful rubbing of the bones and which is a result of degenerative spinal disease; an inborn scoliosis abnormality that arises with the spinal curves growing to one side instead of straight upward; when the spinal canal narrows or known as spinal stenosis; a tumor growth on the spine; or an abnormal shifting of a spinal disk which is called spondylolisthesis.
To perform spinal fusion surgery, depending on the specialty method of the surgeon, there are actually two ways to start the operation, which are by way of the surgeon doing the incision through the belly, which is known as anterior lumbar inter-body fusion, or by way of directly starting the incision from the back, which is called posterior fusion, and after doing any of this, the surgeon will see to it to move to the sides the muscles and organs so he can see the spine and inspect where the damaged area is, then immediately removes the joints between the spinal disks and replaces these using any of these: screws, rods, bone graft which is bone taken from the hip or pelvis and some surgeons after replacing the damaged joints will also include placing in of a bone morphogenetic protein, which is responsible for bone growth. Knowing that in every surgery there is bound to be a risk, surgeons will need to explain the possible risks to their patients, which are bleeding, blood clots, infection, pain, risk from anesthesia, and other potential problems, like nerve injury resulting into numbness; if it is a bone donor, complications such as tissue rejection and infection may set in; and the worst could be if the spinal fusion does not work and the back pain may return.