I appears that both posters may be the same person, so my response is for both posters.
A prolapsed disc can be healed with physical therapy, but one must continue with the exercises that where learned during the physical therapy for the rest of one's life.
It is necessary to do those exercises at minimum, once a day, but it is better to do them twice a day every day.
If you had relief from pain with physical therapy and didn't follow through with continued exercises in a home maintenance program, then it sounds like the prolapse returned.
Another form of treatment that can help is epidural steroid injections to help relieve the pain, promote decrease in inflammation and with the physical therapy exercises done at home, heal the disc.
I'm assuming that you mean you took nerve pain medications to relieve the pain, either neurontin or lyrica. Both of those relieve the nerve pain but they do not strengthen nerves.
You also said you got pain relief from those meds.
If you have had physical therapy and followed through with the home maintenance program of twice daily exercises and still have return of pain,
you might want to try some epidural steroid injections to the area with the disc prolapse.
Another question though, is how old is your MRI that has been used to help diagnose your spine problem?
If it is more than 4 months old, then you need to get a new MRI done to help evaluate your spine and see if there are any further problems that are going on than just the one prolapsed disc.
Most doctors will not use an MRI that is more than 4 months old to evaluate a spine as it will not show if there are new problems that have developed or if the findings on the old MRI have gotten worse.
Spine surgeons do not like to play guessing games and do exploratory surgery to find the spine problem. They want some guidance in what is going on by way of MRI pics, combined with the symptoms that the patient exhibits.
Spine surgery is a scary thought, been there done that.
That being said, though, what your doctors are advising you to do to relieve your spine pain sounds like a microdisectomy or a disectomy.
The doctor goes in and snips off the part of the disc that is bulging. Many times they also widen the canal of the vertebrae to be sure there is plenty of room for the disc to return to where it belongs and be sure that the nerves have plenty of room to pass through the canal of the vertebrae.
This kind of surgery has an extremely high rate of success in relieving any and all pain that the patient has.
I can vouch for it's success personally and after trying all the conservative measures to relieve my pain, I turned to surgery for the relief, even though I had once said that there was no way I would have any kind of spine surgery.
Homeopathy or acupressure isn't going to cure this problem for you.
As for listening to all these people telling you not to do this. Here are some questions to think about when they tell you this and you believe them.
Have any of these people had back problems like you have?
Have anyof these people suffered they way you are suffering in pain?
have any of these people had any kind of spine surgery and know what they are talking about?
Do any of these people have medical degrees or any other kind of medical training and no what they are talking about?
No matter where you go on the web, including spine health sites like this one and there are tons of them out there on the web, you will find horror stories and those that have had one surgery after the other on their spine.
It makes it appear that this is the norm for spine surgery.
What you need to remember is that many of those people that post on these sites are also posting on many other sites and using different names. that makes it appear like there are far more people that have problems with spine surgery than actually do.
Another point on all these people on various spine sites with serious problems is that they are there for help with problems.
The majority of people that have spine surgery may appear on these sites for a while and have surgery, get their life back and don't post on the forums anymore.
Those success stories are the majority and they do not have time to post on the forums any more. They are too busy living their life.
I'm one of the few that post on various spine forums as a success story. I personally feel that it is important to post on them and show others that the successes far out way the ones that are not a success.
I personally know so many people that have had successful spine surgery. There are at least 50 of us from my own spine surgeon's office and we get together several times a year and celebrate how we have our lives back, enjoy living and have a good time.
If I had listened to those people around me that told me to never have spine surgery I would be an invalid in a wheelchair, with no bladder control, living on narcotic pain meds and have no life.
Good luck
Fran
