Originally Posted by Throttlejockey
We too were biased against going to Europe. You would be crazy to not be! But at the end of the day we wanted to have someone with the professional edge and selected Dr. Clavel.
First of all, as a professional pilot, I can tell you that the riskiest pilots are the ones that know how to operate the airplane, but lack experience in its peculiarities and seasoning in the cockpit. We call these guys "High Mins" Captains - they are allowed to fly the line, but are not allowed to fly in challenging conditions. So when the weather is bad, the company substitutes a more experienced guy for the flight.
Like pilots, we found that many of the highly regarded US surgeons whose names are often tossed about on this forum are still "High Mins" surgeons. They can do the procedure well with exceptional outcomes. But if you exhibit a clinically challenging diagnosis, they will revert to recommend a fusion or hybrid just as Antifragile has experienced. Call it CYA or whatever, but it is really frustrating to get your hopes up, and then have them quickly dashed when they so NO and push for the fusion.
Our experience was that Dr. Clavel felt that he had a 95% chance of getting it done, but told us he would have the fusion device at the ready. We asked him why the US doctors didn't approach it the same way, and he suggested they likely didn't feel comfortable with de-compression at the C6/C7 due to the advanced stage of my wife's condition.
As for the Mobi-C vs M6, we preferred the constrained design of the M6 over the unconstrained design of the Mobi-C, but at the end of the day, the Mobi-C was OK for us and we were prepared to have the Mobi-C. However, since we could not find a US Surgeon who gave us any confidence they would do the procedure the Mobi-C was not an option. On the other hand, Dr. Clavel has a lot of experience with the M6. In addition, there have been over 32,000 of these devices implanted so far so it is not something new.
Finally while some get reimbursed by insurance (Congratulations! You're in the minority of the minority), most that require a multi-level do not. As one of the seven doctors we talked to here in the US said to us, "your insurance won't cover it, so why talk about something you can't have."
I believe that once the insurance issue is resolved, multi-level ADR will become more common, and the issues of experience and seasoning for US Surgeons will go away. Until then, this problem will persist.
Overall, so far, we believe the decision to go to Europe was the best decision we could make given the information we had at our disposal at that time. We are happy with Dr. Clavel and the professional staff in Barcelona, but only time will tell.
TJ
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