New member, hello everyone

[jrnyc]

i have never seen my curves of 42 and 61 called severe ...one surgeon called them "moderate to severe"...i never think of them as severe..to me, "severe" means curves of 80, 90, 100, etc...but that is just my own thinking...
now, my degenerative disc disease...that is severe!

jess

[Davis]

I'm taking what you say to heart. I just wanna be fixed

[Back-out]

I'm taking what you say to heart. I just wanna be fixed

I know, I know (pats gently on shoulder).

Don't know if a list will make points clearer as a summary. I think I can speak for all in saying we really empathize with your suffering and wishes. When it comes to a decision for or against surgery, patients are rarely encouraged or discouraged because the choice is so individual.

However, some who are highly disabled (I may be such an example) are sometimes encouraged to "get with it" - not in so many words - especially if there are insurance deadlines. OTOH rarely, some who don't seem to have passed a thresh-hold of pain/disability/disfigurement (cosmesis is the last on purpose), are encouraged to wait.

Why?

Because:

a) there really is NOT a fool-proof "fix" for scoliosis - not surgical, nor non-surgical.
b) We all want to be made "good as new" (only with the new limits of the fusion, which we try to anticipate as well as we can), and indeed,
c) the odds with a good surgeon (for most of us) DO favor significant improvement.
d) However, there are major, major risks - including the risk we will feel/function worse, maybe even look worse after surgery than we did before. Even death is a real, though rare, possibility - certainly, more than with most surgery.
Therefore,
e) one should realistically only go in for such radical surgery HOPING for things to get better - NOT to be "fixed".
f) if one goes for surgery with (relatively) minor symptoms and disability, the odds of a obtaining an outcome worse than we began with, are that much greater!

That's why reputable scoliosis surgeons (defined loosely as members of the SRS) have cut off minimums of "severity" below which they won't operate. As you've been told in spades, the surgical miinimum is a combination of absolute measurements and rate of progression factoring in a score to represent functional disability (usually the Oswestry disability index).

It's their way of standardizing the risk they are taking on behalf of the patients, in case patients seem to have unrealistic expectations, given the current state of the art (what the surgery is likely to be able to accomplish) . Then too, some surgeons exclude patients they feel are unlikely to be satisfied or who have such high risk of complications it would spoil their own surgical track record!

We want you to know this because frankly, there are almost always surgeons willing to operate even on patients below this standard. What's more, we know how tempting it can be to believe unrealistically optimistic guarantees when one is in pain (physical or psychic) . Most often we tend to discourage patients from wasting time or money on unproven non-surgical promises but the risks of surgery are even greater (one stands to lose more than that!).

It's hard to get or give a really firm answer because we don't want to hurt feelings or presume to know what another is feeling. I'm afraid this may be confusing you here. Your use of the word "fix" invites the clearest discouragement I can give, though. It simply doesn't apply to the world of this surgery.

[Davis]

back-out, how long ago did you have your surgery and did you attain any correction at all? What was your before and after? Thanks.

[Back-out]

I know you got my PM yesterday but I'm indicating it here in case anyone thinks I ignored you!

[rohrer01]

Okay, I had to look for this thread. But here is the scoop from the NSF itself about severity guidelines: (It was in the most FAQ section)

Do you think a chiropractor could help my scoliosis?
For moderate to major curvatures:
We do not know of any long-term study which shows that chiropractic treatment can stop a moderate (over 25 degrees) or major curve (over 40 degrees) from progressing in the bone growing years. It has been our experience that chiropractors who are knowledgeable about the development of idiopathic scoliosis in children will refer young patients with such curvatures to an orthopedist for a second opinion.

Bold is mine. I knew I saw it somewhere.