Healthcare

Back pain is an everyday reality for many adults. It keeps them from performing daily activities that others take for granted, and it sends many people to the doctor. In the U.S. workplace, employee back pain has a significant impact,with lost work hours and health-care dollars reaching billions of dollars each year. The Spine Center at St. Mary's Medical Center is renowned for developing innovative treatments to help people with back pain enjoy a full life again and return to work more quickly. The Center's doctors are among the nation's foremost innovators of new surgical techniques to treat back pain. In the last decade, they have developed many of the improvements in minimally invasive surgery that now benefit patients around the country.Techniques developed recently at the Center are designed to treat complicated spine problems.

When surgery is the answer
As San Francisco's premier spine center, St. Mary's offers a full spectrum of back-pain treatments. Many spine-pain sufferers respond to non-invasive treatment, but for those who require surgery, the Spine Center provides an array of the latest surgical techniques with emphasis on minimally invasive approaches that lead to faster, less costly recoveries.

James Zucherman, M.D., the Center's medical director, and Ken Hsu, M.D., director of spine surgery, are recognized pioneers in the field of minimally invasive spine surgery. Together, they invented the X STOP® to treat painful, debilitating lumbar spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spine that causes pressure on the spinal nerves and affects an estimated 400,000 Americans.

Spinal stenosis, also called neurogenic claudication, occurs when the spine enlarges and traps nearby nerves. Patients experience numbness, weakness and other symptoms in the back and down the legs after walking or standing for a period of time. The symptoms are relieved by sitting or lying down. Before the X STOP, the only surgical treatment option was laminectomy in which parts of the bone and tissue are removed to reduce pressure on the nerves. Sometimes, spinal fusion is necessary.After surgery,patients stay in the hospital for several days and are unable to return to work for an extended period.Full recovery takes anywhere from three months to a year.

Advantages of minimally invasive surgery
Manufactured by Kyphon Inc. in Sunnyvale, the X STOP is an ingenious titanium device that can be implanted between two spinous process bones in the spine to relieve pressure on the nerves. The implant is performed under local anesthesia without the need to move any bone or soft tissue. Many patients are able to go home on the day of surgery and can go back to work in one or two weeks. The procedure is a major alternative to open back surgery.

"With the X STOP, patients typically experience immediate relief from pain," reports Zucherman, who was recently named one of the country's top medical technology innovators for 2007 by the Wall Street Journal."In patients for whom this procedure is appropriate, the X STOP.
read more...