Dr. N D M Ismail

The spinal cord is such a crucial part of the body, and an injury to it can really change people’s lives for the worse. After all, controlling our movements, our sense of feeling and directing the limbs, among other things, makes it so very important. It does happen sometimes that injury to it requires surgery. Isn’t the prospect of the surgery going wrong quite a scary one?

For decades, whenever surgery to the spine was required, the surgeon needed to cut open the skin covering the spine as well as some extra skin, perhaps to see what needed to be done and then go ahead and carry out what was actually required. What this basically meant is that surgery resulted in more damage to the muscles and skin. This led to people taking longer to recover.

Most of the injuries that surgeons who specialise in surgeries of the spine comes across are decompressions and fusion of the spine. While the old style open surgery was popular, it is good to know minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS) is a possibility since it is spreading across the medical world and makes so much sense.

So, what can a person look forward to while having an MISS, as compared to the conventional kind? When it comes to MISS, the incisions which have to be made in most of the cases are very small. Generally, they should not be longer than a few inches. The reason why they need to be made is so that the equipment can be inserted into the body and so can a camera so that the surgeon can see what he or she is doing with sufficient amount of accuracy. Moreover, since the incision is small, the blood loss is less and the scar on the patient’s body is also small.

Well, the best part is that it will take far less time for the patient to get up and running again. The return to activities, which were part and parcel of one’s daily routine, will take a lot less time. This also means that the medical costs which one would need to bear would be lower as a person would be able to move back home from the hospital a lot sooner than would normally be the case.

Considering this, there is not much to “MISS” about the era of open surgery! If you wish to discuss about any specific problem, you can consult an Orthopedist.