Spine Surgery: Fill & Download for Free

Of course.I had spine surgery in 2015. I almost had fusion. I got a second opinion and was talked into arthroplasty. A really great guy on Quora who was a medical sales expert helped me out. He set me up with a well regarded spine surgeon and I made an appointment. That doctor really spent time with me and helped me decide on another surgery.This is really important because if you are about to allow someone to cut into your body, best to be very comfortable with what they’re gonna be doing. The original doctor was just a fusion specialist. So of course that is what he recommended. A better doctor did his job and then I found a new surgeon to do that surgery. None of this would’ve happened without that second opinion.Very happy I thought of it.

True story. 1130 at night. Sick patient with an acute subdural hematoma. Needed surgery emergently. We took him up, got the case going. A young person shows up with an unlabeled bottle of white milky fluid. She insists that the patient must receive it IV for a research protocol. The patient did not have to give consent per the IRB protocol. This patient is at death’s door. Anesthesia doesn’t want to hang it, because they don’t know what it is. I have no idea what this is. I told her to get out. She insists that she has a right to be there and that the nameless liquid must be hung because the patient had already been randomized. After trying to be polite, I told her to get the fuck out of my OR. She walked away sobbing to her superiors. I never heard anything more about it.When I was a resident, we requested an ortho consult for a guy with a frozen shoulder about to undergo lumbar spine surgery. The attending chastised me. I was insolent. He kicked me out of the OR. He did the case by himself.Yes, a surgeon can kick someone out of the OR.

Psst. You just cherry picked (at best) with no empirical evidence. And “empirical evidence” to be meaningful, has to be given context:We’d need their income bracket.Types of diseases they treat.We’d need the comparables to which Americans leave the US for treatment too.Back in 2015, I needed spine surgery. I wanted arthroplasty which nobody around me did and which was super expensive. I looked and looked and with the help of a prominent Quoran at that time, we found a doctor who’d do it. But my insurance still wouldn’t pay what was going to be (as I had to dig for literally WEEKS) about $18,500 up front.On the other hand, I could go to Germany (where it was invented) for $12,000 and that was going to come with several days in the hospital, or Malaysia, for $10,000 and a week in the hospital. (The Malaysian hospital was staffed with American, Canadian, Australian and other “western” educated doctors, the founder of which was a prominent US physician who’d pioneered spine surgery in the US.) I nearly bought the ticket to go to Malaysia for a week, when my insurance finally agreed.For a great many procedures, there will be no better place than the US. But that is cherry picking too — how many of those cutting edge cases is it worth to have come to the US for surgery vs. the current technology in medicine that millions of Americans are denied because of cost? We don’t need to have either/or. We can have them both (as I submit we would with a universal plan). But suffice it to say, for a great many procedures, you’ll probably go to the US if you had enough money. For the rest, you can go anywhere, the question at that point is about quality of care and cost.The surgery billed at $135,000 USD for 36 hours in University Hospitals Cleveland.