Do I Need Back Surgery?

The decision to proceed to surgery for back pain or sciatic pain is huge. You require expert guidance in this regard to help you make the right decision.

The good news is that purely on statistical grounds the likelihood is low that surgery will be required for your symptoms.

It is important to seek expert help early and be guided by the right roadmap.

Be aware there are thousands of very poor roadmaps to follow when it comes to low back pain symptom management and if you are following one of those then no matter how hard you try, how disciplined and supported you are, you will never reach your “destination objective” of a pain-free healthy back.

Clues that you are on the wrong roadmap are, being told your core is weak and that you need to exercise more or lose weight, receiving regular manual therapy, releases or massages for “tight” muscles, being referred for more spinal injections or medications for your back pain and finally that you are just getting old with disc degeneration and arthritis. These are all fallacies and an indication that your physical therapist, doctor or personal trainer does not understand the disease which causes back pain symptoms.

Get out while you still can, save your money and book in to see us as soon as possible to receive the correct “road map”. It may still be a long journey because of a lot of time wasted but at least you can now get there.

There are circumstances when surgery is the most appropriate treatment especially when irreversible compression of vital neural structures is causing concordant symptoms or the spine is mechanically “unstable” – which itself has nebulous definitions.

The key factor that Dr David Johnson will help explain to you with his career-long experience and special interest in back pain symptom management is that back pain will only effectively be managed when you eliminate the disease that caused your symptoms.

Ignorance of this is a major reason why back pain treatments both surgical and non-surgical fail because the treatment offered has only been symptom-based and not cause-based.

When this sub-optimal approach is actioned patients may get better for a short while but because the actual disease of Movement Dysfunction that caused the symptoms in the first place has not been eliminated they return weeks, months or years later often with greater intensity.

Consider a patient who has been diagnosed with a disc prolapse or arthritis of the spine and suffers pain symptoms. A surgeon may offer a microdiscectomy, laminectomy, fusion or disc replacement and perform these procedures perfectly.

Research shows us that in approximately fifty percent of cases, patients still suffer back pain after surgery. This persistence of pain or perceived failure of surgery is not likely to be related to the surgery being ineffective but more likely to the fact that the disease that precipitated the required surgical condition in the first place has not been addressed effectively.

That causation or disease process is being more clearly recognized and researched by Dr Johnson and his team who are global leaders in establishing an imperative paradigm shift in understanding of the disease of Movement Dysfunction that causes Back Pain symptoms.

Back Pain itself is not a disease.