[LBP]

Cat,

I think you are absolutely entitled to ask how many procedures they've done, and the success rates. I think it's your obligation to ask these questions before you decide on a surgeon and surgery. I've never had a dr refuse to tell me and most of the time the people who make the appointments with me over the phone, have been able to answer this question before I agree to even see the surgeon! I then confirm this information with the dr during the consultation with follow up questions.

In my area, I still don't think any individual surgeon has done more than 10-15 max. There is one local surgeon my PT highly recommends...I've never met with the surgeon yet, but periodically I call the office for an update on their number of ADR surgeries.

Some hospitals in my area have insituted a policy of not performing the surgery for a number of years and a handful of surgeons and at least one local hosptial will do it but hardly anyone can have it done because of the ins obstacles.

I will likely go out of state for surgery once I can get a green light from ins or an upcoming clinical trial and pick one of 3 or 4 surgeons that were involved in the Charite, ProDisc or the upcoming Activ L trials.

Finding experienced ADR surgeons close to home??? It doesn't take too much time to search out info on this forum. Click on "find" then "advance search" and type in Florida or workers compensation or WC as keywords. I noticed at least one surgeon named in the Miami area. Dr. Garcia??? dont know anything about him but you might want to talk to the person who had surgery with him and track his outcome.

Obviously there a number of surgeons named over and over again who are located in CA, NY, and TX but other states have participated in the ADR clinicial trials and all those drs should have done more ADR surgeries than drs not involved in clinial trials.

I cant speak to WC issues but I know others on this forum have dealt with WC to try and see someone specific.

Oh...one more thing...if you look back in time on this forum when Charite and ProDisc were in clincial trials...there was a lot of discussion about the differences in design and what might be better for different people. If you go to the manuf websites and see animations of the different discs you can see how they move differently. The only discs FDA approved are Charite and ProDisc, both ony at one level. ProDisc had a 2 level arm of the clincial trials but the FDA has not yet made a specific ruling on the 2-level part of the trials.
I believe Kineflex is still under trial against Charite and someone recently mentioned that Activ L might be starting their trial against Charite instead of what we previously heard. Orig we heard Activ L was going to be tried against Prodisc.

no one seems to talk much about Maverick these days. Heard some rumblings that there was a problem with the design of Maverick at multiple levels (spliting a vertebrae because the keels where too high)..don't know what the status of that one is anymore.


Good Luck