The Many Benefits of Minimally Invasive Surgery

Surgery has long been viewed as a sort of last resort for improving your health as this solution isn’t exactly low impact. While this might have once been the case across the board, advanced surgical technologies allow the medical community to take a far more minimally invasive approach to resolve a wide range of issues, from removing organs to fixing painful problems along your spine.

Here at Texas Spine Consultants, our team, which includes Dr. Michael Hennessy, Dr. Chester Donnally, Dr. Heidi Lee, Dr. Andrew Park, and Dr. Robert Viere, prides itself on providing our patients with the highest standard of care. Since we specialize in spine surgery, this high standard of care comes in the form of minimally invasive surgery, which rises head and shoulders over traditional techniques. Let’s take a look.

What does minimally invasive surgery mean, exactly?

Traditionally, surgeons needed to gain both visual and manual access in order to perform their work. This meant creating incisions that were big enough to accommodate large hands and that provided a comprehensive field of vision. And there’s a fair amount of collateral tissue damage that comes with this type of open surgery.

With minimally invasive surgery, we solve both the visual and manual challenges with technology. First, we can get a 3D, high-definition view of the surgical site using a miniature video camera that we insert through a small incision. This camera sends images to a monitor that we can magnify, improving our visual access.

Next, to perform the necessary work, we thread specialized instruments through different small incisions and these instruments translate the movement of our hands in much smaller spaces. Let's face it, human hands are large, and if we can use tiny instruments that do the work in tight spaces, we can greatly minimize collateral tissue damage.

The many advantages of minimally invasive surgery

As we started to get into above, this minimally invasive approach to your surgery provides you with some great benefits, including:

• Less collateral tissue damage
• Reduced blood loss
• Smaller risk of infection
• Reduced scarring
• Less postoperative pain

All of these benefits add up to the most important advantage — a faster recovery. You’ve spent long enough dealing with your back or neck problem, and the last thing we want to do is to add to your burden. With minimally invasive surgery, we can get you on the road to improved spine health more quickly and safely.

Minimally invasive techniques and your spine surgery

At our practice, we’re able to use  minimally invasive surgical techniques to address a number of different conditions, including:

• Degenerative disc disease
• Lumbar spinal stenosis
• Sacroiliac joint dysfunction
• Spinal deformities, such as scoliosis
• Compression fractures
• Spinal tumors

In many cases, we use minimally invasive techniques to relieve nerve compression and improve spine stability.

If you want to explore whether we can resolve your spine issues with minimally invasive spine surgery, please contact one of our offices in Addison or Plano, Texas, to schedule a consultation.