Laser Spine Surgery vs. Traditional Surgery

As you may know, traditional spine surgery involves scalpels, or other precision cutting tools, and often entails opening up the back with a wide or long incision. Muscle tissues are pulled aside so surgeons can get a good look at the problem and repair it.

Back pain is usually classified as either acute or chronic pain. Acute back pain is most common and lasts approximately six weeks or less, while chronic pain is rarer and persists for six months or more. Someone with acute pain has usually experienced a fall, sports injury or car accident, for instance, while those with chronic pain may not be able to connect their discomfort with a single impact or cause. Treatment for acute pain includes rest, physical therapy and pain relievers. Acute pain will often resolve over time and surgery is not needed or recommended. People with chronic back pain, however, may be good candidates for spine surgery.

For chronic pain, such as spondylolisthesis, where the vertebrae slips out of place, spinal fusion surgery is often required. Spinal fusion joins multiple vertebrae together to prevent rubbing between them. In fusion surgery, a plate, screws and bone grafts are placed around the spine necessitating a large incision, resetting of the spine and fusing of bone alongside the repair to keep it immobile. This procedure often involves more than one incision site or vertebrae and incisions are usually 4 to 6 inches long. The vertebrae interfuse after several months. Spinal fusion requires a hospital stay of approximately a week and a long recovery time from a month to a year or more.

An incision of less than an inch to a couple of inches is all that's required for laser surgery, which lessens the amount of displaced and severed tissue. This smaller incision results in a smaller scar, but it also limits the view of the entire area around the spine, which some surgeons consider a necessity in traditional surgery. Often, laser surgery is confused with minimally invasive surgery, but minimally invasive surgery most often involves a small incision, a tiny endoscope with a camera for viewing inside the body and traditional surgical techniques without lasers.

When using lasers, the surgery itself is dramatically different than traditional spinal surgery. In a process called ablation, doctors remove the sources of nerve sensitivity and pain by lasering off the ends and decreasing the size of the disks between vertebrae to relieve the pressure that is causing pain. Laminotomy removes some of the "meat" of a disk, or adjacent bone spurs or growths, decompressing the disk size and reducing the amount of pressure on the spine and surrounding tissues. Disk decompression or repair can be performed as an outpatient procedure with a healing time from days to several weeks. These treatments help with bone spurs, herniated and bulging disks, and spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the area around the spinal column that causes excess pressure.

Laser spine surgery is a minimally invasive procedure that repairs damage to the spine. Surgeons of varied specialties utilize the procedure. For example, orthopedic surgeons use a lengthy endoscope to assess damaged spinal discs and the discs are trimmed with lasers. Many surgeons prefer lasers for their precision in cutting out damaged discs without damaging surrounding tissue.