09/28/2025
Sometimes they are necessary but if you are not fixing the root cause, the problem does not go away and may even get worse.
Since it entered its first boom in the early 1990s, the field of spine surgery, and specifically spinal-fusion surgery, has faced criticism over lackluster outcomes, excessive procedures, and conflicts of interest. Throughout the last couple of decades, many studies have found that surgery isn’t effective in the long term at treating back pain without a clear cause, and the number of revision operations for spine surgery is higher than those of other orthopedic surgeries.
Despite that, rates of fusion surgery in the U.S. ballooned more than 200 percent throughout the 1990s, and the number of instrumented spine surgeries being performed annually has nearly doubled since 2013. There have never been as many spine surgeries as there are now and perhaps never so much mainstream conversation about them.
Much of the criticism throughout spine surgery’s history has come from surgeons disillusioned with their field. Last year, Jonathan Choi, an MIT-educated spine surgeon, went viral with a video in which he laid out his reasons for abruptly quitting his job and moving to the mountains. “I knew something was not right, right away,” he said into the camera. He described a bad spine as a house with a leak. “The surgeries that I could do were like going into that house, tearing down the drywall, ripping out the moldy insulation, putting in brand-new insulation, and rebuilding the wall,” he said. “But not fixing the leak.”
Read more about the increasingly controversial surgery that has become one of the country’s most lucrative specialties: https://nymag.visitlink.me/D6zBkW
