Recovery After Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery: What Patients Can Expect

I always joke about this with my orthopedic fellows. I've had an orthopedic training program for the last 13 or 14 years, and not even one of them has opted for spine surgery as a career — they're very happy doing a knee replacement, arthroscopy, or a fracture nail instead. Spine surgery has evolved so much that the moment they look into the scope, everything is very tiny, and that can be discouraging — it looks very uphill. It takes a little while to enter the system and understand what's going on through keyholes; one has to be patient, because it has a steep learning curve and the margin of error is not there. So for the last four years I've run a dedicated fellowship national training program for spine fellows — once they're selected and come to me, they don't have the option to go to any other theatre, because they're now committed to spine surgery for the rest of their life.

We feel privileged to be treating your patient, and I hope we have done justice to you, your practice and of course the patient. I think at the end of the day we all have one common goal — we want to see our patients happy. Otherwise you, me and Jivo would not be here on a Sunday evening, leaving our families aside, if we did not have this goal.

Patients undergoing a straightforward discectomy or decompression for conditions such as lumbar canal stenosis often stay in hospital for just one day, walking the same evening or the next morning.

Patients undergoing spinal fusion with implants typically stay two to three days, also walking the day after surgery, with residual back stiffness usually resolving by 70 to 80 percent within two weeks.

One patient with a severe grade three spinal slip underwent minimally invasive reduction with percutaneous screws, robotic implantation, decompression and cage placement, and flew home just one week after surgery.

Fast recovery is central to making spine surgery in India accessible for patients from Africa, since minimally invasive and endoscopic techniques avoid the large muscle damage that once made recovery a matter of weeks rather than days.