Dr. Gbolahan Okubadejo

Actually, it gets more challenging when patients have

very specific ideas as to what treatment that they need.

So some patients, regardless of their symptoms, if the pain's been going on for a while, let's say they've had some treatment, physical therapy, maybe injections, they'll research a very specific procedure and they come in looking for that.

But without an understanding of how your pathology is what really determines the treatment, there's no way they know what they need.

And that's why we're experts because

you know, a good expert, a good spine surgeon is trained in all the techniques.

And then we match the patient's pathology to the surgical technique that will best suit them.

So some patients are great candidates for minimally invasive procedures.

Some patients have pathology where minimally invasive is not appropriate for them and they need something more traditional.

So I think that's really the disconnect where there's so much information that

that people educate themselves, but they don't really have the experience or know how to allocate pathology to treatment plan.

Yeah, there are two major ones.

So the first one is no one gets better from spine surgery.

A lot of people feel that if they get surgery, that means it's almost like a, not a death sentence, but you know, they're doomed to be limited indefinitely.

And that's definitely false.

That's false because the technology has evolved to a point where we're more efficient with our techniques, our diagnostics.

So actually get patients much better, much quicker.

And the outcomes in spine surgery have never been better.

So that's definitely a myth that we're trying to allay as strongly as possible.

The other thought that's a major misconception is that spine surgery is very dangerous.