What We Want You to Know About Failed Back Surgery Syndrome

Undergoing surgery of any kind is no small effort, and you trust that all the time and energy you put in will be rewarded on the other end with improved health. Or, in the case of spine surgery, you’re hoping for pain relief and more freedom of movement in your lower back.

So, when your outcome isn’t what you hoped and you feel like you’re back at square one, you’re understandably frustrated. In the world of spine surgery, we call this failed back surgery syndrome (FBSS), which is common — FBSS affects between 10% and 40% of patients.

As experts in spine surgery and neurosurgery, Dr. Ali H. Mesiwala and our team would like to share  a few thoughts about failed back surgery syndrome.

When back surgery fails

Any time you see the word syndrome, it refers to a group of symptoms. In the case of FBSS, the key symptom is usually pain — pain that persists after surgery on your lower back or new pain that develops as a result of the surgery.

In either case, the surgery didn’t deliver on pain relief, and you’re left dealing with ongoing or new pain.

This pain can develop immediately after surgery (it’s really just a continuation of your original pain) or it might develop weeks or months down the road.

In most cases, the chances for FBSS increase with the complexity of the spine surgery. For example, FBSS is more common after lumbar spinal fusion than it is after a microdiscectomy.

Law of diminishing returns in back surgery

Making matters more challenging is the fact that going back in surgically after you develop FBSS offers fewer chances of success.

In fact, there’s a distinct law of diminishing returns when it comes to spine surgery:

• Up to 30% of spine surgeries are successful after a second surgery
• Up to 15% are successful after a third surgery
• Up to 5% of surgeries are successful after a fourth procedure

So, we may advise against following up a failed back surgery with another surgery, unless we can pinpoint the exact problem and see a clear surgical path forward.

Nonsurgical approaches to failed back surgery

The good news is that surgery isn’t always the answer. If your original spine surgery fails to bring you relief, we can try different avenues that don’t involve surgery.

An example of this is neuromodulation in the form of spinal cord stimulation. With this approach, we disrupt the pain signaling with mild electrical impulses. To get outfitted with a spinal cord stimulator, we insert electrodes into the area of your spine where the nerves are overactive, and then we implant a battery pack just beneath your skin to power the energy.

Spinal cord stimulation is a great road to pain relief and one that’s completely reversible.

We also offer muscle restorative stimulation, which can help with low back pain. With this treatment, we stimulate the muscle groups in your lower back to strengthen them, which relieves the pressure off your spine.

So, as you can see, there’s no need to go back to the surgery well when you have FBSS, as there are alternatives.

To explore your options for moving past failed back surgery syndrome, please contact one of our offices in Newport Beach, Marina del Rey, or Rancho Cucamonga, California, to schedule a consultation with Dr. Mesiwala.