Sunday, June 5th, 2011
Recently Dr J.C. Smith published and article with startling revelations about Back Pain and Spinal Surgery that should make anyone run from their doctor’s surgical suggestion. “There’s an 80 percent chance you’ll suffer back pain during your lifetime, for which your medical doctor will 1ikely recommend over- the-counter pain medication or prescription medication to relieve the pain temporarily. Depending on your doctor’s assessment and how you respond, they may even consider you a candidate for spine surgery at some point, an increasingly likely (and dangerous) option. Then there’s chiropractic, which research and experience show that care from a boulder chiropractor would be the safest, most effective option for most cases of back pain. Unfortunately, too many people end up in a medical doctor’s office instead of a chiropractor’s office, which accounts for the rampant use of medications and surgery for back pain, particularly here in the U.S.”
Some of the facts the public needs to know:
5OO, OOO-plus disc surgeries that are performed annually (a significant increase of late), as many as 90 percent are unnecessary and ineffective. Richard Deyo M.D. (a 15x increase in the last 6 years)
The rate of back surgery in the United States was 40 percent higher than any other country and was more than five times those in England and Scotland.
After two years, only 26 percent of those who had surgery had returned to work, compared to 67 percent of patients who did not have surgery. Of the lumbar fusion subjects, 36 percent had complications and 27 percent required another operation. Permanent disability rates were 11 percent for patients undergoing surgery, compared to only 2 percent for patients who did not undergo surgery. In what might be the most troubling finding, researchers determined there was a 41 percent increase in the use of painkillers, with 76 percent of surgery patients continuing opioid use after surgery.
Seventeen surgical patients died by the end of the study.
Back surgeries are among the most expensive, and these costs do not include hospitalization, imaging, drugs or medications. Just take a look at these per-surgery costs for various types of back surgeries:
Anterior cervical fusion: $44,000
Cervical fusion: $19, 850
Decompression surgery: $24, OOO
Lumbar laminectomy: $18,000
Lumbar spinal fusion: $34, 500
Back surgery has been accused of leaving more tragic human wreckage in its
wake than any other operation in history,” according to Gordon Waddell, MD, director of an orthopedic surgical clinic for over 20 years in Glasgow, Scotland. “Low back pain has been a 20th century heath care disaster,” said Waddell. “Medical care certainly has not solved the everyday symptom of low back pain and even may be reinforce and exacerbating the problem.”
Fortune 500 companies spend over $500 million a year on avoidable back surgeries for their workers and lose as much as $1.5 billion in indirect costs associated with these procedures in the form of missed work and lost productivity, according to a two-yea r study by Consumer’s Medical Resource
]n 2006, doctors performed at least 60 million surgical procedures of various types; one for every five Americans. No other country docs nearly as many operations. Not only are surgeries rampant, but many arc being shown to be ineffective and dangerous according to Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, medical care is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., causing 225,000 preventable deaths every year as tools to make them safer go unused
William Lauerman, MD, chief of spine surgery and professor of orthopedic surgery at Georgetown University Hospital, stated: “I’m an orthopedic spine surgeon, so I treat all sorts of back problems, and I’m a big believer in chiropractic.”
In Fact, Anthony Rosner, PhD, testifying before the Institute of Medicine, stated: “Today, we can argue that chiropractic care, at least for back pain, appears to have vaulted from last to first place as a treatment option.”
Faced with spine surgery -a procedure with inherent risks and increasingly poor outcomes – why would you ever choose to go under the knife?
Tags: best boulder chiropractor, best chiropractor boulder, boulder back pain, Boulder Back Surgery, Boulder Chiropractic, Boulder Chiropractor, Boulder Pain Relief, Dr Daniel Knowles, D.C., network chiropractic boulder
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Back Pain, Chiropractic, Dr Daniel Knowles, D.C., Network Family Wellness Center, Network Spinal Analysis, Pain Relief, Surgery |
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