Did you know failed back surgery syndrome (FBSS) exists?

Did you know failed back surgery syndrome (FBSS) exists?

That’s right, the surgery for your debilitating low back pain could have failed. The number of patients who have experienced this are rather staggering as a study in 2016 points out.

“Patients with FBSS have had chronic long standing back pain, with or without referred or radicular symptoms and have had one or more surgical interventions that have failed to treat the pain. Unfortunately, this happens all too often, with conservative estimates at 20% but other estimates as high as 40%”

That means that patients who have had pain longer than 1 year with or without tingling, burning, or numbness in their back and leg had surgery and it failed. On average 30% of the time.

Wow, that is alarming! Imagine taking your car to get the oil changed and 3 out of 10 times it doesn’t work.

The study lists a number of reasons for these failures in both preoperative and postoperative circumstances. They include smoking, obesity, litigation, psychiatric disorders (ie. depression and anxiety), origin of back pain, progression of degenerative changes, and altered biomechanics.

The latter three are music to my ears.

  1. How does back pain happen?

  2. Is it a degenerative problem that needs to be managed accordingly?

  3. Can your body move like it is supposed to?

Those are 3 of the most frequent questions we ask ourselves AND our patients ask us on a daily basis. Our treatments restore proper biomechanics and strengthen weak muscles while allowing your body to heal and dramatically slow down the progression of degeneration.

Low back pain is not to be taken lightly. The burden of cost on our healthcare system is $100 billion a year! These numbers are from last decade so you can imagine what the new data will show.

This is not meant as a jab to surgeons. It’s meant to bring awareness to the importance of a complete diagnosis.

Treatments will only be effective if there is a complete understanding of the condition and the attending doctor knows the limits of his/her treatment. Can we help every patient we see? No and our doctors have protocols set for when a patient will benefit from care and when they won’t.

How does Functional Pain Relief fix low back pain?

  1. 15 minute consultation to determine if your condition qualifies for examination.

  2. Examination to establish complete and accurate diagnosis of your condition.

  3. Our doctors treat fibrous adhesion and nerve entrapment. These 2 conditions account for the vast majority of unresolved muscle, nerve, and joint pain.

  4. Treatments are done over a series of visits and progress is tracked through improvements in functional testing, decreasing pain, and return to normal activities.

  5. Case is complete when patient goes 1 month with little to no pain, functional tests are stable, and a return to agreed upon activity.

Does that sound like something you want?





Carl NottoliFunctional Spine and Sport