by PETER WALDMAN and DAVID ARMSTRONG
… Hehn turned to Ensor Transfeldt, a surgeon at Twin Cities Spine Center in Minneapolis. Transfeldt performed fusion surgery on Hehn, screwing together three vertebrae in his lower spine.
Fusion aims to limit painful spine movements. This one didn’t work out. Two years later, the pain in Hehn’s neck, lower back, buttocks and thighs is so bad that he can’t hold a job and seldom leaves home, he said in an interview.
“There’s days when I just can’t take it and the tears run,” said Hehn, 52, who lives in Sartell, Minnesota. He said he takes oxycodone for pain, Soma to sleep, Lexapro for depression and Imitrex for headaches.
The number of fusions at U.S. hospitals doubled to 413,000 between 2002 and 2008, generating $34 billion in bills, data from the federal Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project show. The number of the surgeries will rise to 453,300 this year, according to Millennium Research Group of Toronto.
…
“It’s amazing how much evidence there is that fusions don’t work, yet surgeons do them anyway,” said Sohail Mirza, a spine surgeon who chairs the Department of Orthopaedics at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire. “The only one who isn’t benefitting from the equation is the patient.”
Bloomberg for more
(Thanks to Salim Amersi)