Was with my mate at the weekend, his daughter’s wedding.
Low back problems for several years, had the carpenters in about eight weeks ago.
Showed me a picture of the Meccano set in his lower spine – widening the discs and so on – looks bloody impressive, and more importantly, he feels like a new man.
I am after a minimally invasive endoscopic micro discectomy.
The problem with having scaffold put in your back is that most of the time they have to cut away healthy muscle and bone to do it. This is a massively invasive process causing huge amounts of trauma, not to mention the fact they remove muscle........a mate of mine is a Doc in the UK and he always used to compare NHS authorised style of lumbar surgeries like to trying to do precision surgery on a salami. Impossible.
Simplistically the way the micro endoscopic surgery works:
1. They knock you out and strap you to a bed.
2. Using a CT X-ray scanner the make a small incision of around 18mm and push a long needle in to the area where they are going to do the surgery - just to ID and locate the point of surgery.
3. They then push a thin tube into the patient over the top of the long needle, expanding the size of the entry hole. This is followed by tubes of ever increasing size up to around 18mm diameter.
4. The Doc then works down this tube using the endoscopic instruments fitted with a 4K camera. The 4K image is displayed in the operating room on a BFO telly screen. being 4K the Doc can see in great detail what he is working on.
5. With a discectomy they simply remove the herniated, or damaged, part of the disc protruding into the nerves running behind the vertebrae. When the offending protrusion has been removed the remaining soft disc material is cauterised. The small incision means that they generally only apply maximum two stitches, or a couple of sticky butterfly stitches.
6. Two days later you are discharged. Take it easy for 4 to 6 weeks to let the cauterisation heal and then resume normal activities.
Germany, surprise, surprise, are the leading lights for this surgery but, it is generally available in most mainland european countries. The Doc I am looking at has done the procedure around 15,000 times, the procedure itself taking between half an hour and one hour for complicated ones. Cost is around €12,000 - €15,000, all in.
Seeing as I have to pay for medical in the US anyway I always approach these things with the point of view of: What would they do for the Queen of England, President of the USA, or top sporting personality. There is usually some procedure that is available which is far better than the usual quackery we get offered and it usually does not cost a great deal more, and more importantly it is life changing for the better.
