Living with severe back pain can be debilitating. If left untreated, the pain can make it difficult or impossible to perform everyday tasks.
There are a number of treatments that can address the many causes of back pain, including surgery. While surgery can make a big difference with certain kinds of pain, people sometimes think it will make all their discomfort go away. Surgery is not always a cure-all. And it’s important to understand what you can (and shouldn’t) expect from spine surgery, so you go into the procedure prepared for what comes next.
One of the most important parts of my job is helping patients understand their back and spine conditions and what’s causing their symptoms. With that in mind, let’s look at the most common causes of back pain in adults, and how we treat these conditions.
What causes back pain in adults?
Some back pain in adults is normal. In fact, 80 percent of adults will experience lower back pain at some point in their lives. As we age, back pain often occurs due to degenerative conditions such as arthritis. Degenerative conditions cause parts of the back to gradually break down, becoming weak and painful.
Degenerative disc disease, for example, causes the discs (vertebrae) that hold the spine together and absorb shock to gradually degenerate. They become less effective at performing their function over time, which causes pain. When people have a sedentary lifestyle and lose strength and flexibility in their core muscles (abdominal, low back and oblique muscles), this places more stress on the degenerative spine and accentuates the back pain.
Spine conditions that cause degeneration often cause pain in the arms or legs. That’s because as the disc wears down and loses height, the neuroforamen (the space where the nerves exit the spine) narrows and pinches on the nerves. As a result, pain radiates down the length of the nerve and makes the arm or leg numb and weak.
One of the most common – and most painful – of these nerve symptoms is called sciatica, in which the sciatic nerve in the spine is pressed or pinched, causing pain to shoot down the lower back and legs. Sciatica is caused by degenerative back diseases, such as herniated or degenerative discs.
Can surgery help any kind of back pain?
We almost never recommend surgery as a first step for treating back conditions. Traditional spine surgery is invasive and, like any surgical procedure, it comes with the risk of complications. Patients need weeks or months to recover, depending on the procedure.
Most often, we prescribe non-narcotic pain medications, physical therapy and steroid injections to help strengthen problematic areas and alleviate the local inflammation of our patients’ bodies. If none of our non-surgical pain relief methods are effective, we’ll consider surgery.
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Why can back pain persist after surgery?
While we can fix some painful, nerve-pinching conditions with surgery, the degenerative diseases that cause them don’t just go away.
Let’s say I’m treating a patient’s sciatica through spinal fusion surgery. This procedure involves removing arthritic bone that is pinching on the spinal nerves, as well as joining several vertebrae in the lower back, using bone from another area of the body to help the spine “bridge” the area that’s pressing on the spinal nerve to relieve that pressure. This surgery is effective at treating the leg or arm pain that radiates into the extremities, because the nerves are no longer pinched or compressed.
But surgery does not necessarily stop degeneration in other discs or joints, which is the condition that caused the patient’s back pain and sciatica in the first place. Essentially, spine surgery can treat the symptoms of degenerative diseases, but usually not the cause, which is usually genetic.
