New guy annular tear

JOJO70 · #1 06-25-2021, 08:33 PM

Hello everyone I wish I could have found this forum earlier. I’ve been suffering from chronic back pain for 10 years. I had my first MRI 2 years ago. The surgeon said There was nothing that remarkable on my MRI, so I kept taking NSAIDS and doing chiro core etc. Nothing ever helped except NSAIDS. I tried stopping the NSAIDS 1 1/2 years ago it was like getting into a car wreck, I got to the point where I couldn’t walk, I felt like Tim Conway playing the old guy on the Carol Burnett show, that was my fast pace walk. After 2 years of research I self diagnosed myself with discogenic pain or pain within the disc itself being generated from an annular tear. I found a you tube on annular tears by Dr. Tony Mork sent him my mri and he confirmed my diagnosis. What was amazing was a second surgeon who read my second MRI said the pain was in my head, not only was the tear visible as a high intensity zone on the MRI it was in the narrative of the dr who read the MRI. I just had micro discectomy at DISC in Phoenix. Tears are very hard to fix, so I am starting to explore ADR in the probably most likely event the surgery didn’t fix me. Anyone Out there with advice on annular tears.

Harrison · #2 06-27-2021, 08:19 PM

Hi Jo,

Hey, if you search the forums, they go way back to 2006, when I started this community:

https://www.adrsupport.org/forums/se...threadid=14151

I recall a woman who has a really tough time with diagnosing her pain, which turned out to be an annular tear. Try searching for that - her name was Sue.

annapurna · #3 07-05-2021, 11:44 AM

Do you know the degree of annular tearing? Are you leaking fluid out of the disk or is it primarily internal tearing?

There have been some ideas suggested if the disk is still retaining fluid. Those ideas all revolve around injecting some kind of healing agent like stem cells into the disk, like a discogram, to try to heal the structure from the inside. There's been very little work to my knowledge and the nature of the treatment makes a blind study inadvisable so there will always be some degree of skepticism over the idea.

IDET and similar thermal treatments to thermally treat the annulus have been proposed and, to use the joke, quickly disposed having largely been proven to be non-useful and potentially damaging.

If you had asked about this maybe a few months after your car accident, there would be a chance of healing the tear, albeit slowly. Saying you still have pain 2 years later makes it much less likely you'll get natural healing.

If you have an MRI to reference, how much disk height did you lose in the affected disk? Is the disk still bright on the MRI (still hydrated) or turning dark (dehydrating and losing strength)? Those questions might guide you towards a bigger intervention now, like ADR or fusion, instead of a minor intervention. If your disk is apparently giving up the ghost, it may not be something that can be turned around and made functional.