What to Do When Your Back Surgery Has Failed

By Steve Hefferon, CMT, PTA

While working with the Healthy Back Institute, I have talked to thousands of back pain sufferers who have either willingly or begrudgingly undergone some form of surgery. They are shocked to learn only afterward that most spinal surgeries typically fail three to five years later.

By "fail," I mean that you find yourself in pain once again. In fact, these operations are so unreliable, the medical establishment coined a term for them: Failed Back Pain Surgery Syndrome (FBPSS).

It's not your fault that you were misled or that you once again are finding yourself in pain. And while you think your case is unique, it is not. There certainly are a thousand different circumstances leading to back surgery, but the truth is your story has ended up just like everyone else's.

The trouble is due to a slight defect in the medical community's approach that gets played out over and over when dealing with back pain surgery. And this defect explains why, in most cases, surgery is at best only addressing the symptom and not the reason why the condition became symptomatic in the first place. Lets take a look at a classic example.

You go to see your general practitioner. Your GP warns you about a progressive degenerate scenario and refers you to an orthopedics specialist who recommends more testing and, based on their findings, may or may not refer you on to a neurosurgeon. So you get passed up the line to ensure the highest probability of surgical success – but only from a surgical standpoint.

You most likely were given your diagnosis but never told why the condition developed and became symptomatic in the first place. So without knowing the root reason why the condition developed, the root reason will not be addressed. Thus, the result is to treat only the symptom. Now don't get me wrong. Surgery can and does give you your life back, but at a big price.

Let me make something very clear about surgery. I would have hoped that you did everything under the sun before deciding to undergo an operation because your body will most likely never be the same again. Surgery may temporarily relieve your pain, but you will undoubtedly feel differently about yourself, from the way you handle physical stress to your underlying mental reservations about what you can and cannot do anymore.

Did your back operation only leave you feeling fragile, not healed? If so keep reading. There is hope...

A lesson in balance

The respected Back Pain expert Dr. John Sarno, in his book 'Healing Back Pain,' has called back surgery 'the ultimate placebo.' If you want to know his explanation of the Placebo Effect you will have to read his book, and I do recommend it. In any case, we at the Healthy Back Institute call surgery 'a very expensive symptom reliever.'

Now I bet you are wondering why we call surgery a symptom reliever and not a solution. What exactly do we mean by 'addressing the root cause?'

We could chose any condition to describe this, but I will use a herniated disc for my example. Let's assume that your disc was herniated and began pressing on a nerve. Your surgeon told you this pressure is what was causing your pain, so they went in and removed that part of the disc touching the nerve. And wham! the disc is no longer touching, thus there is no more pain.

So why are you now in pain again? Because the root cause of why the disc herniated in the first place was never addressed. That is to say, the same forces that were causing the disc to herniate in the first place are still working against you. In fact, they can again be causing pressure at the same original surgical site as well as above or below it. And unhappily, it is not uncommon for a patient to undergo multiple surgeries trying to address this reoccurring scenario.

What are these painful herniating forces? They can be described as muscle imbalances that are making the pelvis go into an abnormal position, thus forcing the spine into abnormal curvature, and this abnormal curvature in your spine puts abnormal pressure on the disc, so that over time the disc starts to bulge outward.

Surgery does nothing to help restore balance to your pelvis or restore the natural curvature in your spine. Surgery cannot make muscles more flexible or stronger, and it surely cannot restore postural stability to insure long-term relief. All surgery did was temporarily remove the irritation. However, as time progressed, once more the muscle imbalances caused what are called postural dysfunctions, and those postural dysfunctions again put abnormal stress on your disc... and here you are in pain.

Overcoming your challenges

I will tell you that there will be some challenges ahead for you, such as learning to communicate effectively with your medical team. I suggest you study all of the different types of treatments that are appropriate for your current condition, to make sure you understand what their goals are, and then you should ask tough questions.

Let me give you a quick list of possible treatments that you should study regardless of the type of surgery that you underwent...

1. Systemic Enzyme Therapy: One of the best ways to break down excess post surgical scar tissue.
2. Trigger Point Therapy: Most any traumatic disturbance done, like surgery, to your soft tissue will activate and irritate trigger points.
3. Stretches and Exercise: By far the most important treatment needed. If you do nothing else, you have to study Muscle Balance Therapy

Because stretching and exercising is so important, let me say a little bit more about Muscle Balance Therapy. Its sole specific purpose, is to help you understand how your body is out of alignment, to identify muscle imbalances and postural dysfunctions, to reveal the root cause and help to develop a more stabilized pelvis so that you can tolerate the stress of your day. Remember that surgery cannot make muscles stronger and more flexible or help your body become more balanced. That is why you need very specific and targeted exercises to work toward a more neutral, more balanced and more stable pelvis for long term relief.

Muscle Balance Therapy emphasizes the physical, the mind/body and the optimum nutritional strategy you need to insure that, to heal your back successfully, you treat your body as a whole.

Doing nothing is never a great option.