Physician at Work: A neurosurgeon eases pain with minimally invasive surgery

Patients who needed spine surgery once had no choice but to undergo painful operations that required a week of hospitalization and six weeks of recovery. Now, minimally invasive surgery has drastically reduced the pain and recovery time of such procedures as discectomies, decompressions, and spinal fusions.

Khalid M. Abbed, MD, chief of spine surgery at the Yale Spine Institute, said that minimally invasive surgery requires a hospital stay of only two days and allows a return to work in two weeks. It provides the same long-term pain relief and patient satisfaction as open surgery, but with less injury to soft tissue.

Abbed regularly performs minimally invasive spine surgery, which involves dilating muscles rather than cutting through them to reach the spine. Using a small tube much like an endoscope, he can reach precise areas of the spine through small incisions, and repair problems microscopically, minimizing the soft tissue trauma of open surgery. The result is a shorter hospital stay, less pain medication, and a quicker return to normal activities.

Minimally invasive techniques are useful not only for degenerative disease, but also for spine tumors, according to Abbed. Patients with metastatic cancer to the spine may not have a long life expectancy and minimally invasive surgery allows them to avoid long hospital stays and lengthy recoveries.

“This is the wave of the future,” said Abbed, who is the principal investigator of a multicenter prospective clinical trial sponsored by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and Congress of Neurological Surgeons to compare open spine fusions and minimally invasive spine fusions.