Spine
In the realm of spinal fusion surgery, the quest for faster, safer, and more reliable bone formation has led to…
Joanna Kemp, MD, spent nearly a year preparing for an operation she may never perform again. The anatomy was extraordinarily rare. Two 2-year-old girls were conjoined at the head, with shared vascular structures that would have to be mapped and…
Minimally invasive spine surgery keeps redefining itself — not just through new technique, but through new arguments about what “minimally invasive” should even mean. In 2026, that tension is playing out everywhere from CMS payment rules to the operating room…
For most of my career, the spine patients I saw all told a similar story: pain for a prolonged period of time, multiple primary care visits and too many over-the-counter remedies. Out of options, they would finally come to my…
Gerald Kadis, MD, a neurosurgeon who practiced at John D. Archbold Memorial Hospital in Thomasville, Ga., for 46 years, died Sept. 16 following an 18-month battle with cancer. He was 80. Dr. Kadis completed his neurosurgical training at Columbia Presbyterian…
A spine surgeon can decide a fusion, disc replacement or decompression is the right operation. That does not always mean the case will move forward as planned. Across recent Becker’s reporting, spine surgeons have described payer rules reaching deeper into…
Exeter (N.H.) Hospital and Portsmouth, N.H.-based Atlantic Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine signed an affiliation agreement to expand orthopedic services in the region, according to a Sept. 22 Foster’s Daily Democrat report. The affiliation is expected to take effect Jan. 1,…
Spine surgery has become increasingly capable of correcting severe deformities. Kristen Jones, MD, is interested in a different measure of progress: whether surgeons can keep more patients from ever needing those operations. Dr. Jones, an associate professor of neurosurgery and…
Saqib Hasan, MD, has been practicing endoscopic spine surgery for nearly a decade, and he’s grown tired of a particular conversation. It’s the one where someone points to a study showing no significant long-term outcome difference between two surgical approaches,…
When Christopher Tomaras, MD, a neurosurgeon and owner of Alpharetta, Ga.-based Axion Spine & Neurosurgery, began practicing in Atlanta in 1998, hospital employment was barely part of the physician landscape. Nearly three decades later, he looks around the city and…
A study of 168 consecutive patients undergoing minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion found secondary cage collapse in 20.5% of patients who received the Catalyft PL expandable cage, compared with 1.8% of those who received the X-PAC cage. The retrospective,…