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The Interventional Orthobiologics Blog
Pain After Neck Fusion: Adjacent Segment Disease
This past week, I have have seen several patients with neck fusions. All of whom had pain caused by the fusion. For some, the fusion had helped one problem and caused another. For others, the fusion didn’t help and just made things worse. So what’s going on? An Overview of the Spinal Column To understand…read more
Leg Muscle Wasting as You Age? Check Your Low Back Nerves
Have you ever noticed that thinner older people have flatter butts and skinnier legs compared to young people? According to new research, this isn’t just your imagination, but a real physiologic effect of aging. One that again shows us how much the nerve supply of the low back impacts our legs without us knowing it’s…read more
Piriformis Injection: What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You
It’s hard for both physicians and patients alike to understand the intense complexity of the connected body. It’s easier to come up with a description for one part that hurts and call it good. I call this “parting it out,” and this is definitely the case with a piriformis injection. Even though there are likely…read more
The Long-Term Side Effects of Spinal Fusion
On this page: The structure of the spine Fusion can cause adjacent segment disease The long-term side effects of spinal fusion The purpose of a spinal fusion is to stop movement. A one-level fusion removes the disc between two vertebrae and uses screws and other hardware to force the two vertebrae together, which then fuse…read more
This Is SO Wrong: Neck Fusion Gone Bad
I have had about enough of my spine-surgery colleagues who perform a single fusion that doesn’t work and then keep digging the proverbial hole deeper and deeper by performing more fusions. Case in point this morning is a poor middle-aged woman with her whole neck fused! Now she’s miserable and has complications related to the…read more
Another Lower Back Stem Cell Injection Patient Result
Way back when, in 2005/6, when I injected the first patient in the world with stem cells into a damaged low back disc, it was “way out there.” In fact, we had to be under the supervision of an Institutional Review Board just to get it done. How times have changed in 13 short years.…read more
Lower Back Stem Cell Treatment: Top 5 Things to Know
In the last few years, there’s been an explosion in chiropractic and other clinics offering lower back stem cell treatments. The big problem, however, is that while some of these stem cell treatments are real, the vast majority are fake or just poorly done. As the first physician in the world to perform lower back…read more
