Back Fusion: How common are complications from surgery?
Hello!
This week I want to talk about the complications of spinal fusions. We are not a fan of surgery to address pain as it makes things worse.
However, surgery is necessary for specific causes like broken bones, deformities, and accidents.
Being that surgery is risky either way, I wanted to look at how often people develop complications from it.
Let us look at the evidence.
I found a study that was comparing two types of spinal fusions of 485 people comparing various things including how often complications arise from the surgery.
The complications found were infections, returning of severe radiculopathy (pinched nerves with pain and numbness), need for revision (redoing) of the surgery because of infections, instruments (screws and bars used to fuse the back) causing back pain requiring the instruments to be taken out, pinched nerves requiring decompression and screws causing pinched nerves that need to be removed.
They found that within one year of the one type of surgery complication rate was 10.4% and the other, called fluoroscopic guided spinal fusion, had complications 35% of the time.
This type of surgery also required three times more revisions.
In this study, the second type of operation was six times more likely to lead to complications.
If you are thinking to yourself, I would rather have the other operation, are you sure you want to have a lower risk of horrific complications?
Like the surgery and the screws causing back pain, need to be removed, all of which causes permanent damage
OR
Do you want to try something different?
Jason
