If you suffer from chronic back pain, you know it can affect almost every aspect of your Life. Everyday activities bring discomfort, and you aren’t feeling your best. Thankfully, RiverView Health can help relieve your pain and get you back to the life you want to live.
RiverView Health is proud to offer the innovative services of Neurosurgeon Hamid Abbasi, MD, and Spine Surgeon Sunny Kim, MD, world leaders in minimally invasive, complex spine care. Drs. Abbasi and Kim treat patients from all over the country with the latest, most advanced technology available. They help patients that other spine surgeons cannot. Drs. Abbasi and Kim treat spinal conditions with conservative, nonsurgical therapies whenever possible and only resort to surgery when necessary to alleviate pain, correct deformity, or halt the progression of a degenerative spinal disorder.
What is Minimally Invasive Surgery?
A high percentage of patients do not require surgery, but if surgery is necessary, both providers offer minimally invasive spine surgery through groundbreaking fluoroscopic techniques that reduce surgical damage and provide a faster recovery. Fluoroscopy is a type of medical imaging that projects a continuous X-ray image of the surgical site on a monitor. The surgeon can use the fluoroscopic image to view the surgical site and more precisely perform the surgery with a much smaller incision.
Minimally invasive spine surgery offers:
• No muscle damage: The incision – smaller than a dime – protects back muscles and surrounding tissue.
• Lower risk: Surgery that used to require hours is performed in minutes.
• Outpatient surgery: Most patients are discharged less than 24 hours after surgery.
• Faster recovery: 96% of patients walk unassisted 2 to 24 hours after surgery. Most patients return to work and their other normal activities 2 to 4 weeks after the surgery.
Of the many procedures, Drs. Abbasi and Kim offer, Oblique Lateral Lumbar Interbody Fusion (OLLIF) is one of the most innovative. The OLLIF procedure represents medicine’s latest advancements in minimally invasive spine surgery. It treats back pain related to degenerative disc disease, herniated discs, spondylolisthesis, scoliosis, and spinal stenosis. An OLLIF procedure is often required when a disc is damaged or is degenerated. Typically, the height of the disc is reduced, unstable, and bulging. This condition, in turn, can put pressure on the nerves exiting the spine and can cause severe pain in the legs and back. OLLIF reestablishes the height of the disc, reduces movement of the disc, and alleviates pain. Other diseases and conditions treated for chronic back pain include:
• Facet Joint Syndrome
• Thoracic Disc Disease
• Arthritis of the Spine
• Fractures
• Myelopathy
• Radiculopathy
• Spine Deformities
Meet Our Specialists
Dr. Hamid Abbasi is board-certified with the American Board of Neurological Surgery. He is an expert in brain and spine disease. His vast experience includes minimally invasive correction of deformities and scoliosis, surgical pain management, complex spine surgery, trauma, spinal stabilizations, spine and spinal cord tumors, brain tumors, pituitary tumors, brain hemorrhage, non-emergent trauma, vagal nerve stimulator, peripheral nerve, and carpal tunnel. A graduate of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, with a doctorate of medicine and philosophy, he spent 13 years after graduation pursuing extensive neurosurgical training at world-famous institutions, including the University of Heidelberg, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Texas.
Dr. Sunny Kim is an orthopedic spine surgeon certified by the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery and the American Board of Spine Surgery. Dr. Kim averages hundreds of surgical spinal cases each year. He is among a select number of surgeons in the United States who can take out a thoracic disc herniation in a minimally invasive manner. He also specializes in performing spine surgeries that require a high degree of expertise, including OLLIF. After graduating from the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, Dr. Kim pursued an Orthopedic Surgery Residency at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. Later, he became a Spine Surgery Fellow at Minnesota Spine Center, a fellowship program recognized as one of the very best in the country.
If you are suffering from back pain, Drs. Abbasi and Kim have the medical expertise and technological capability to successfully treat your problem and help you recover as quickly as possible. Call RiverView Health today at 281.9595 to make an appointment and start your journey back to your best self.
