by Curt Pesmen
The fifth of 5 operations you don’t want to get—and what to do instead.
Since the 1980s, operations for lower-back pain and sciatica have increased roughly 50 percent, from approximately 200,000 to more than 300,000 surgeries annually in the United States. That rise is largely due to minimally invasive advances that include endoscopic keyhole tools used in tandem with magnified video output.
To its credit, surgery (endoscopic or the traditional lumbar-disc repair) does relieve lower-back pain in 85 to 90 percent of cases, docs say. “Yet the relief is sometimes temporary,” says Christopher Centeno, MD, director of the brand new Centeno-Schultz Pain Clinic near Denver. And that adds up to tens of thousands of frustrated patients who find the promise of surgery was overwrought or short-lived.
by Curt Pesmen
by Curt Pesmen
by Curt Pesmen
Maybe I’m the wrong ex-patient to be telling you this: Experimental surgery erased stage III colon cancer from my shell-shocked body six years ago. But even I’ve got to admit that all is not well in America’s operating rooms. Please don’t get me wrong. I’d go back under the scalpel in a minute if I had a gastro-tumor recurrence (like White House press officer Tony Snow did) or some totally unrelated, unforeseen orthopedic emergency (a knee injury, for instance). But at least 12,000 Americans die each year from unnecessary surgery, according to a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) report. And tens of thousands more suffer complications.
I was 48 hours away from surgery, obsessed with wondering how my life and my body would change, when I was crudely reminded of why having my ovaries removed could be a really good thing. I got my period with the works—bloating, pimples, and cramps. As usual, I subsisted on ibuprofen every three hours. It was strange thinking this would be the last time I’d feel this way. 
