Spine

For some spine surgeons, questions about Medicare are shifting from how to absorb another payment cut to whether participation still makes financial sense at all. The pressure has been building for years as physician reimbursement falls behind practice costs. Now,…

An ad with famous athletes and their new knee brace. A company marketing the “first ever” joint replacement made for women. A surge of online influencers proposing peptides as the cure-all treatment. Increasingly, patients who would once walk in looking…

Spine surgery has become remarkably good at measuring what it can see.  Surgeons can quantify alignment, study images in extraordinary detail and plan increasingly precise operations. But one of the most consequential questions in spine care remains far less exact:…

For years, Ramin Raiszadeh, MD, watched the same thing happen between operations. The patient left. Environmental services cleaned. Nurses reset the room. Anesthesia prepared the next patient. Surgical technicians readied equipment. Everybody was working. And the operating room still sat…

A typical measure of success for spine surgeons is normally measured by a clinic visit at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and maybe a two-year follow-up survey. Jang Yoon, MD, director of minimally invasive spine surgery at the UC…

Endoscopic spine surgery has long been synonymous with lumbar discectomy, according to Jang Yoon, MD, director of minimally invasive spine surgery at the University of California San Francisco — but he doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t see endoscopic…

As patients cycle through injections, ablations and other conservative treatments, some spine surgeons have said delays in specialist evaluation can come at a cost. Nine spine surgeons discussed where the referral system breaks down and how earlier surgical evaluation could…

Atlanta-based Northside Hospital has expanded its network of care with physicians and advanced practice providers across specialty and primary care services in Georgia. The additions included providers in primary care, cancer care, endocrinology, general surgery, neurology, orthopedics and pulmonology, according…

An international group of spine surgeons developed a classification system to quantify the invasiveness of degenerative lumbar spine procedures. Roger Härtl, MD, director of spinal surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine and neurosurgical director of Och Spine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical…

As Americans live longer and stay more active into their 70s and 80s, more of them are undergoing hip and knee replacements — and, increasingly, complex spine surgery to correct deformities that can worsen with age. But Christopher Ames, MD,…