Introducing minimally invasive spine procedures has allowed one surgeon to provide better patient outcomes that historically weren’t possible.
Craig McMains, MD, a spine surgeon at OrthoIndy, recently joined the Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast to talk about the shift toward minimally invasive procedures in the spine industry.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are the big headwinds that you’re planning for this year?
Dr. Craig McMains: A little over a year ago, we started an endoscopic spine program at OrthoIndy, and that’s been something that’s really kind of caused me to see a paradigm shift in how I view patients. Historically, the foundations of spine surgery are to stabilize, decompress and correct. Now, I don’t have to approach that with an anatomy-altering approach anymore. I don’t have to do a spinal fusion to get an adequate decompression or to preserve integrity, and so being able to have these ultra-minimally invasive approaches to the spine where we can decompress the neuro elements and preserve anatomy, has been a real boon in my practice. Patients love it. They’re getting back to activity faster and just really having great recoveries.
The analogy I kind of always bring up from my orthopedic background is, look at where shoulder arthroscopy went and the treatment for rotator cuffs. We used to do these open approaches and historically they were highly disfiguring and highly morbid for patients to undergo. Well, we got better. We developed these less invasive, or minimally invasive techniques, like a mini-open deltoid-sparing approach. Some people would advocate it was superior for a long time, even after arthroscopy got introduced because historically, arthroscopy is really challenging, cumbersome and expensive for shoulders. But now, if you look at the current landscape, that’s the gold standard. Nobody would tell you that you should go backwards and have these open approaches, even in a less invasive fashion.
So, I think spine is going to go through that paradigm shift as a field, and we’re going to do better at preserving normal anatomy while alleviating pathology. That’s my big headline and a change I see in my practice individually is how do I keep leveraging that?
