More than 200,000 Medicare patients with back pain underwent $2 billion worth of unnecessary surgeries, including spinal fusion and/or laminectomy or vertebroplasty, over a recent 3-year period, according to an analysisopens in a new tab or window of Medicare claims data from the Lown Institute.

If unnecessary, such procedures put patients at risk of blood clots, pneumonia, heart and lung issues, infections, paralysis, and death. After surgery, 10% to 40% of patients experience “failed back surgery syndrome,” in which the vertebrae do not fuse back together, the report said.

“The times in which spinal fusion and laminectomy work for spinal stenosis is when the stenosis is causing neurogenic claudication, or radicular symptoms, meaning you’re getting pain shooting down the leg; the nerve is pinched,” Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, told MedPage Today. “But if you don’t have that … and you just have spinal stenosis without that pain, then those surgeries have not been shown to be effective.”

Spinal fusion is recommended […]