Fear of movement after spinal surgery

Patients with back pain have many common concerns in common. One is that they are afraid to move because of the pain. Surgery is suppose to take care of this fear. Researchers followed 97 patients following disc surgery looking for a post-surgical occurrence of kinesiophobia “fear of movement.” What they found was surprising.

The researchers reported: “Half of the patients suffered from kinesiophobia 10-34 months after surgery for disc herniation. These patients were more disabled, had more pain, more catastrophizing thoughts, more symptoms of depression, lower self-efficacy, and poorer health-related quality of life than patients without kinesiophobia.”

For many, surgery did not quell their fears but put them on a path towards failed back surgery syndrome.

Prolotherapy and Platelet Rich Plasma therapy, when performed by an experienced physician, can help your body heal itself and thus help you avoid surgery.

This is the basic premise of prolotherapy as a pain-reduction therapy; bodies are designed to fix themselves once they are injured. Of course, there are many ailments that the body cannot fight alone, and this is where modern medicine comes in to assist when our immune systems are overwhelmed and our reconstruction abilities can’t cut it on their own. Prolotherapy gives the body the boost it needs to right itself.

In our practice, we often see patients who have a diagnosis of herniated discs based on pain in their back and pain in their legs.

Upon a physical examination, we often find that it is not a disc problem but referral pain from a ligament meaning they have a sprain.

Read a related article “unnecessary back surgery”

Svensson GL, Lundberg M, Ostgaard HC, Wendt GK.High degree of kinesiophobia after lumbar disc herniation surgery. Acta Orthop. 2011 Dec;82(6):732-6. Epub 2011 Nov 9.