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What Are the Advantages of Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery?

What Are the Advantages of Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery?

When you think of spine surgery, you may envision a large incision in your back and months of painful recovery. This isn’t necessarily the case any longer. In many cases, minimally invasive techniques are now able to cut roughly in half the length of a hospital stay and recovery time required after spine surgery.

What exactly is minimally invasive spine surgery?

First, let’s look at how back surgery was traditionally performed, and how some procedures are still performed. In what is called “open” surgery, the surgeon makes an incision, perhaps 5-6 inches long. Then to access your spine, they need to get around the back muscles. With open back surgery, this requires cutting through the muscles, which injures the muscles and soft tissue surrounding them at the same time the surgeon is fixing the spine.

Because of the larger incision and the injury to soft tissues, you have a higher risk of bleeding and infection, a longer hospital stay, and more pain, requiring more medication. Your overall recovery time will also be longer. 

By contrast, surgeons performing minimally invasive surgery will make one or more much smaller incisions, sometimes as small as 2 centimeters. 

Techniques vary, but typically surgeons will operate by inserting a “tubular retractor,” which is a specially made tube, into the small incision or incisions. They will use that tube to move aside the muscles, without cutting through them.

The equipment they use to operate will all be inserted through the tube. They will use fluoroscopy, which is a type of real-time x-ray, and microscope equipment to guide them precisely as they operate.

Minimally invasive spine surgery can be used for a number of back and neck problems, including lumbar decompression, spinal fusion, vertebral compression fractures, and lumbar spinal stenosis. At NeuroMicroSpine, we use minimally invasive spine principles for virtually every procedure.

For more information on minimally invasive spine surgery or to make an appointment with Dr. Giovanini, please call (850) 934-7545 or click here to request an appointment. We hope to see you soon!

The information contained in this article is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace or counter a physician’s advice or judgment. Please always consult your physician before taking any advice learned here or in any other educational medical material.