[lit-ideas] Kyphoplasty?
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:43:50 EST
I know there are a number of various types of medical Doctors or people with
relatives who are MD's on this list. I have a question for any of you that
might be able to steer me in the right direction. In addition to having
recurrent colon cancer and all the attendant joys of chemo-therapy, my Mother,
who is 63, had had excruciating back pain for months. First they were
concerned that it was cancer moving into her bones. CT scans cleared that one
up.
Then they told her she had severe osteo-arthritis. Another physician nixed
that diagnosis. The most recent diagnosis (how is it possible for something
in
this day and age of medicine to be so undiagnosable??) is herniated discs.
Of course, they want to do surgery. She's absolutely terrified of and
opposed to surgery, but is desperate. A friend who works in a medical records
dept. at a local hospital told me about a fairly recent procedure, called
"kyphoplasty" in which a glue-like cement-like substance is injected into the
places
beteen the discs. A search on Google for "kyphoplasty herniated discs"
turned up nothing helpful. On Medscape and Lancet there were a number of
articles purporting to discuss both things but in the articles I was able to
make
sense of (some of them are overwhelmingly full of anatomical and medical
jargon) the only use for kyphoplasty *seems* to be broken vertebrae. The
local
Doctors here in yahoo-town aren't helpful, particularly as the procedure seems
to be something fairly new. Does anyone out there know anything about this??
Julie Krueger
Trammadol isn't touching her pain .... something's gotta be done!
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