Dr. Erich G. Anderer

I mean, who hasn't had back pain out there?

Hope is that it's only the small minority of people that have that are going to that are going to really need surgery.

So again, sort of looking at the root cause of this, how to get people out of, you know, sort of a sedentary lifestyle, how to get people eating better, how to get people moving again.

I think those are all, again, on balance, sort of net positives.

So those are the three things I'm looking at.

sure i mean you know obviously anything involving spine surgery and the way we do spine surgery um you know is going to be i'd say a good thing with respect to the field and how we're going to treat patients that have this disease and there's so much of that going on you know there's a lot of stuff going on with you know the ways to do surgeries the ways to leverage robotics to do surgeries in ways that are um you know less invasive and you know let's say for example doing a two-part surgery in one sitting using robotic technology

um in ways that we weren't able to do before um you know that's a lot of that research is being done here um by you know by our colleagues um and so that's that's certainly i think um something that is you know um you know a positive in terms of how to how to treat and how to you know kind of move forward with um with treatment algorithms but on the other hand again kind of getting back to the idea of

who is it that needs surgery?

I think that the goal really is in general for people with back pain to avoid surgery.

And how do we do that?

Well, there are ways of looking at...

you know, other types of treatments, other types of modalities to help with this.

And again, if it's like, you know, looking at returning to activities, returning back into, you know, sort of functional movement, there are, you know, modalities I think that we can look at that have been beneficial.

So yoga would be one, for example.

you know, anyone that knows me and that's talked to me knows that I'm sort of a fan of yoga, sent my patients into it.

And again, not necessarily, you know, I don't want them jumping into like hot yoga or doing handstands or anything like that.

But, you know, I think going into like a

a beginner type of program that's modified for people with back pain, I think can be very, very beneficial.

I actually wrote a paper with this yoga teacher named Eddie Stern, who actually is the one that brought Ashtanga yoga as a practice to America from India.

And he is very interested, I think, in this dialogue between sort of more conventional practices