Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery

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MINIMALLY INVASIVE SPINE SURGERY

• By Cuellar Spine

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What is minimally-invasive spine surgery?

• Also referred to as MIS spine surgery or
  MISS, this term has been used a lot recently, and
  not always appropriately. Some surgeons refer to
  any surgery in which they make a smaller than
  traditional incision as MIS surgery. However, I
  believe that the true distinction between
  traditional and MIS spine surgery is the amount
  of muscle dissection and muscle damage that the
  surgeon makes during the surgery. This philosophy
  I attribute to my mentor Dr. Anand, a pioneer in
  MIS spine surgery.

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Muscle-sparing MIS spine surgery

• Many of the operations that I perform as a
  spine surgeon must be performed while keeping a
  few major goals in mind to make you, the patient,
  feel better
• Nerve or spinal cord decompression
• Spinal stability
• Motion preservation at the treated level (s)
  if at all possible
• If I can achieve these goals with the
  surgery, you will feel better. Now lets talk
  about how exactly we can achieve these surgical
  goals together. Depending on what spinal disorder
  you have, we can most likely achieve these goals
  using a variety of different surgical approaches
  or techniques. This is where the true art of
  spinal surgery comes into place the learned
  techniques and preferences that I as a surgeon
  bring to the table.

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• For example, lets say you have a cervical disk
  herniation at two levels. These disk herniations
  are
• Pinching your spinal nerves causing shoulder or
  arm pain and/or
• Compressing the spinal cord, causing you to have
  trouble walking
• Causing neck pain
• Once we have exhausted all non-surgical
  treatments such as physical therapy and
  anti-inflammatory medications and we decide
  together that spine surgery is your best option,
  we can discuss various surgical techniques to
  treat your symptomatic disk herniations. We could
  decide to try a posterior cervical foraminotomy,
  which is technically an MIS surgery, to relieve
  pressure on the pinched nerves.

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• Or we could perform a two-level anterior
  cervical diskectomy and fusion (ACDF). Or we
  could choose to perform a two-level artificial
  disk replacement. Technically, the foraminotomy
  might be considered to be more of an MIS
  procedure than an ACDF or disk replacement.
  However, the foraminotomy requires disrupting the
  neck musculature to obtain access. A two-level
  disk replacement might not sound like a
  minimally-invasive procedure, but we can do it
  through a small incision in the front of the neck
  that does not damage any of the neck muscles.
• This philosophy can be applied to various
  surgical treatments of the spine, such as
  posterior spinal fusion using percutaneous MIS
  techniques or lateral interbody fusions, etc.

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• Contact us
• Cuellar Spine
• http//www.cuellarspine.com
• 450 N. Roxbury Drive 3rd Floor
  Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Phone (310)
  803-9407