Common spinal surgery has more risks than benefits

You’ll be told that it’s a simple, minimally invasive technique that will help you recover from the pain of a spinal fracture quickly. Easy peasy!

But there’s a lot more you should know about vertebroplasty before you sign on the dotted line.

Aside from some nasty potential complications, a new study has confirmed prior research that found this “bread and butter” practice is no better than simply getting a painkiller injected into your back.

For anyone with osteoporosis who’s at risk for spinal injury, here’s what orthopedic surgeons and radiologists everywhere don’t want you to know.

A spine-tingling procedure

To say that a spinal fracture is painful is an understatement.

So, when a doctor offers you an outpatient procedure that will speed up your healing and relieve your pain, what’s not to like?

Unfortunately, a whole lot.

Vertebroplasty is commonly done to stabilize a “compression fracture” of a vertebra in the spine. While it sounds like you’d have to be in an accident or suffer a severe trauma for that to happen, for those with osteoporosis, a fall could be all it takes.

And although this procedure is commonly done and even known as a standard income-stream source for radiologists (who are needed to guide the needle or tube through the spinal muscles and into the bone), the facts of the matter are it’s overrated and unnecessary. And experts have been sounding the alarm on it for close to a decade.

The latest research involved 180 patients in the Netherlands who had each suffered a spinal fracture. Half received vertebroplasty, and the other half simply got an injection of a painkiller.

After following the patients and measuring their levels of pain for up to a year, researchers could find basically no difference between the two groups.

And that’s a very big deal. Because no matter how simple this procedure is made out to be, any time you’re getting a cement mixture shot into your spine through a big hollow needle or tube, things can (and do) go wrong.

One is the actual leakage of the cement that’s intended to fuse the fracture. And since this is your spine we’re talking about and not a pothole, that can cause some major problems if it gets into the spinal canal, a blood vessel, or even the lungs.

In that case, a pulmonary “cement embolism” can form. While your doctor might call that a rare happening, studies have found that it can occur in up to 26 percent of these procedures. Yikes!

Then, there’s the potential of infection, bleeding, increased back pain, and numbness or tingling. It’s good to know, however, that the risk of paralysis is low!

And as I said, this current research isn’t the first time that vertebroplasty has been exposed as a sham.

Back in 2010, two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and considered to be the gold standard in research methods found just about the same results as the recent Dutch study. Where pain relief and mobility are concerned, one of the authors said that there’s no reason to even offer this treatment as part of routine care.

And for the icing on the cake, the FDA issued a warning back in 2002 about the bone cement material that’s used, saying that it has been linked to side effects such as “tissue damage and nerve root pain” if it leaks into the body.

The bottom line here is that vertebroplasty is an unnecessary risk that can end up opening a whole new can of worms. As Dr. Evan Davies, a UK spinal surgeon, has pointed out, a local anesthetic injection is cheaper, safer, and “equally beneficial.”

Plus that, most patients (even those in acute pain, Dr. Davies noted) will improve within six weeks — no cement in the spine required!

“More doubt cast on surgery for spinal compression fractures” Robert Preidt, May 10, 2018, HealthDay, consumer.healthday.com