Continued Pain After Lower Back Surgery

Avoid Another Back Surgery with the Regenexx Approach

Surgery to help back pain has a bad reputation. Almost everybody knows someone who has had bad results. For example, disc surgery can weaken that structure and it can re-herniate. In a fusion surgery, a procedure where part of the spine is bolted together solid, the structures above and below can get overloaded and torn up and this problem is known as adjacent segment disease.

What you may not know and find frustrating to hear, is that unfortunately, in many cases, these surgeries have been shown to be no more effective than sham surgeries, though the risks associated with them are very real. For example, fusion surgery complications occur in 25% of fusion patients. Further, in one study, 76% of patients still require narcotics for pain and miss three times as much work as those who don’t have surgery. Additionally, fusions lead to the wearing down of the segments above and below the fusion site as those segments now take on more movement than they were designed to accommodate, potentially leading to the need for additional fusions over time.

So what can physicians in the licensed Regenexx network offer? Precise, injection based treatments of growth factors or your body’s own healing cells that focus on treating the whole spine. For example, if you’ve had a prior disc surgery that didn’t work, we can inject using real-time imaging to help heal damaged nerves. Or if you have a fusion, our goal will be to reduce pain and improve function. This approach offers less downtime compared to surgery and little to no need for opioid pain medications.