Want To Avoid Surgery? See A Chiropractor

In our Largo office, we see a lot of people who are troubled with back pain, and a few of these folks have been informed they might need surgery to recover. Thankfully, Spinal Health Chiropractic Center has helped many people get relief without the need for any type of surgical treatment. The scientific literature agrees with the results we see in our practice. One study published in the medical journal Spine found that consulting with a chiropractor as your first move in overcoming with your back pain may literally keep you off of the operating table.

In this study, medical professionals from Dartmouth analyzed statistics from about 1,900 workers from the state of Washington who first saw either a surgeon or a chiropractic doctor for their back pain issues. They then examined three years' worth of follow-up medical records to determine whether the subjects ended up having back surgery in an effort to treat the problem.

What the authors found was that about 43% of the patients who first saw a surgeon for their back issues ended up in surgery in that 3-year time span, whereas only 1.5% of those who first consulted with a chiropractor had the same fate. The authors wrote:

"Even after controlling for injury severity and other measures, workers with an initial visit for the injury to a surgeon had almost nine times the odds of receiving lumbar spine surgery compared to those seeing primary care providers, whereas workers whose first visit was to a chiropractor had significantly lower odds of surgery."

These are remarkable outcomes. Seeing a chiropractor significantly reduces your odds of having back surgery, plus the chiropractic patients in this report "had lower odds of chronic work disability" and they also had fewer expensive MRI tests.

Let's also take into consideration this important detail: this study was performed by orthopedic surgeons from Dartmouth College, and printed in the world's most prestigious medical journal on spinal injury.

Surgery: The Last Resort

Any surgery has risks, but a serious problem associated with spinal surgery is that there's a very high failure rate. In an important analysis in the European Spine Journal, researchers wrote:

"Failed back surgery is a problem that has become sufficiently widespread to even warrant its own special conferences, with recent reviews reporting failure rates ranging from 5 to 50%."

The experts in this same study concluded:

"It is extremely difficult to identify unequivocal predictor factors that can be used to accurately predict the outcome of surgery."

As a chiropractor, Spinal Health Chiropractic Center is convinced that surgery should be the absolute last choice for treating back pain. Chiropractic works to restore your spine to its normal function--without the need of risky surgery or drugs--and many scientific studies have demonstrated the efficacy of chiropractic for back pain.

If you live in Largo and you need care for your back pain, give our practice a call today at (727) 531-4444 for a consultation or an appointment. We'll help get you back on the road to a pain-free life!

Studies

• Keeney BJ, Fulton-Kehoe D, Turner JA, Wickizer TM, Chan KC, Franklin GM. Early predictors of lumbar spine surgery after occupational back injury: results from a prospective study of workers in Washington State. Spine 2013;38(11):953-964.
• Mannion AF, Elfering A. Predictors of surgical outcome and their assessment. European Spine Journal 2006;15(Suppl 1):S93-S108.