Have you ever felt that after months and years of pain management, rehabilitation, physical therapy, and regular checkups, you hoped that surgery would be the end of it all? Revision lumbar spine surgery is the solution for you if the pain does not go away. George Kakoulides, MD, conducts most revision lumbar surgery in West Islip to help relieve the debilitating pain and get you back to performing your daily tasks with a healthy back free of pain.
Types of Revision Lumbar Surgery
Revision lumbar spine surgery is a procedure that corrects a previous operation that failed to ease pain from your previous disorder or caused severe internal complications due to misdiagnosis, error, infection, lack of recovery and fusion, and organ malfunction.
Therefore, the following are the types of revision lumbar spine surgery to alleviate the conditions:
- Revision discectomy- If the initial procedure for removing herniated disc did not fully relieve the pain, your physician conducts a revised lumbar discectomy to remove pieces of the herniated disc to relieve compression on the nerve or spinal cord.
- Revision fusion- After lumbar surgery, you are exposed to causes of back pain such as smoking, diabetes, obesity, poor nutrition, causing fusion to fail. However, it would be best to have revised fusion to help your bones heal naturally and fuse.
- Epiduroscopy- After surgery, scar tissue may build up, causing excruciating pain. Epiduroscopy helps to see the irritated areas, remove adhesions and fibrosis with laser, and administer steroids to reduce inflammations and detach the nerve from the scar.
- Foraminoplasty- If after surgery you still have a herniation, bone spur, stenosis, and nerve compression, your doctor conducts foraminoplasty to alleviate the symptoms with minimal impact on the surrounding muscles and tissues.
- Spinal hardware removal and revision- When your body reacts with the hardware installed during surgery, you experience much pain due to infection; therefore, removing the hardware and installing new non-reactive ones coated with antimicrobial prevents infections, relieving you of chronic pain.
Reasons for Revision Lumbar Spine Surgery
Revision surgery may be deemed necessary by your specialist if you still experience symptoms after the first procedure. The following are reasons for revision lumbar surgery:
- Recurrent disc herniation- Occurs after discectomy causing you to experience sciatica and pain down your arms and feet.
- Pseudoarthrosis- Occur due to lack of bone fusion after surgery due to malfunctioned hardware installed, misdiagnosis, and your health habits and conditions such as smoking and corticosteroid, which increases risks of pseudoarthrosis.
- Adjacent segment diseases- Occurs due to anatomical changes at the spinal joint after surgery.
- Problems with implanted hardware- Hardware installed during the first surgery may be reactive, causing chronic infection or may break and cause excruciating pain.
- Total disc replacement- If the prosthetic used during the first surgery malfunctions, revised total disc replacement becomes necessary to ease your pain.
Consult a Revision Lumbar Spine Specialist Today
After spine surgery, most people tend to experience back pain and other excruciating spinal pain. Worry no more, book an online appointment with George Kakoulides, MD, Board Certified Neurosurgeon located in West Islip, New York, and get a comprehensive evaluation of your current records and health, be able to determine why you still have the pain despite the surgery and get lumbar revision surgery to get rid of the debilitating pain once and for all
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