BACK PAIN: Will having surgery get you off pills?
With so many people wanting to get off pills, will this be an answer?
Hey All!
Today I want to talk about if having surgery for back pain will fix your pain and get you off painkillers. Especially opioids AKA the strongest pain killers the doctors can give.
Often by the time we finally do something about our back pain it has progressed and no longer simple. Often it becomes a complex problem.
You may feel that only a miracle will make you better.
Maybe you feel that surgery is going to be that miracle?
Let us have a look at the facts
I came across a research paper that was published in 2017.
The title of the paper is “Predictors of long-term opioid use following lumbar fusion”.
Lumbar fusion being the common surgery for back pain in South Africa.
The article looked at 8377 people who went for lower back fusion to see how many people remained on opioid painkillers after the surgery.
What they found was that using opioids pain killers before surgery increased the risk of using opioid pain killers long term following surgery 6-fold.
You are 6x more likely to be using opioids after back surgery if you used them before the surgery.
They also commented that it is possible that the patients were already addicted to opioids before they had the surgery.
Even the 16% of people who were not on opioids like codeine and morphine before the surgery, were still likely to be on them after the surgery.
The researchers found that “Approximately 50% of lumbar surgery patients used opioids for a total of 3 months after surgery & Approximately 40% for 6 months”.
With your chances of being on opioids pain killers for at least 3 months is 50 % and 40% for 6 months, IF your goal is to stop taking pills for your pain because of the harm they do to the body, surgery seems to do the opposite of that.
17% of people are still on these pills 24 months after surgery.
This seems to me like surgery is not the best option if you want to stop taking pills for your back pain. Especially with 17% of people still on the 2 years after the surgery.
If you are thinking that you are backed into a corner. The only two options you see are life on pills or a risk of being the back-surgery horror story people talk about.
Do you want to try option 3?
We have helped so many people with back pain get off pills and avoid surgery over the years.
I think we can help you too.
Need more information?
CLICK HERE to get our guide on back pain
Jason
