For people with severe disc-related back pain and sciatica, long-term relief can be hard to come by and the treatment options often come down to spinal decompression or back surgery. Each treatment option has its pros and cons, but in the end, the best option will depend on a variety of factors that are unique to each case.
There are some misconceptions about both spinal decompression and surgery that can lead to confusion when attempting to determine the best treatment option, especially when pain or medication may be disrupting the ability to think clearly. The following information will help to dispel some of the misconceptions regarding these forms of treatment and will assist pain sufferers in selecting which option is best for their circumstances.
Spinal decompression is an advanced form of traction, but it has very different effects on the spinal discs than regular traction. Due to computer-controlled motors, true spinal decompression systems can “trick” the muscles along the spine into staying relaxed during treatment, allowing for the creation of a suction force within the disc that pulls bulging disc material back inward and also enhances disc hydration and nutrition that will subsequently promote disc healing. Because regular traction systems must fight the muscles, there is far less of an effect on the disc, and regular traction is usually insufficient to produce any long-term relief of disc-related pain.
While spinal decompression is highly successful in treating most cases of disc-related pain, it is not 100% effective and there are situations in which it is contraindicated. In my San Antonio Spinal Decompression practice, it has been my experience that it is usually not very effective when a patient has a severe disc extrusion, or a full rupture of the disc, rather than just bulging. Spinal decompression is not safe to use when the patient has spinal instability in the are of the damaged disc. In cases where spinal decompression is unlikely to be effective and/or is contraindicated, surgery becomes the only real option for achieving good lasting results.
Although it may be the best option in a small number of disc-pain cases, back surgery is far from being an ideal solution. Patients sometimes have the impression that a back surgery will completely solve their back pain once and for all, but this is rarely the case. Statistics have shown that a prior back surgery is one of the most telling predictors of whether a person will need back surgery in the future. Even though an aggressive back surgery to remove a damaged disc will ensure that the removed disc will never cause a problem again, such a surgery will typically create future problems that can be as bad or worse than the initial disc problem.
Abnormal wear and tear on adjacent discs due to altered biomechanics from the surgery and/or post-surgical scar tissue formation developing months to years after disc surgey can produce new areas of nerve and//or spinal cord compression and irritation. Due to the high probability of these post-surgical complications, it is my opinion that surgery should always be considered a last option when all other treatments have either failed or cannot be used due to existing contraindications.
For a FREE report with additional information on spinal decompression and back surgery, visit the San Antonio Spinal Decompression website.
