What Is Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery? - Dr. Kim (VIDEO)

Dr. Kim:

The important thing about minimally invasive spine surgery is that currently it really is doing the same surgery that we traditionally do open, but we do it in a way that provides for much less soft tissue injury, soft tissue trauma that leads to less bleeding, less post-operative pain, and we are starting to see many other important benefits such as a decreased rate of post-operative infections, decreased rates of the need for blood transfusions, decreased incidents of the need to go to the ICU.

So really it’s an emerging field that takes how we do things in the traditional open way but do those same surgeries in a way that allows for the tissues to be preserved, and really it’s more of a strategy or a technique to do the same thing.

So it’s not vastly different from open surgery in the sense of how we treat patients, what types of patients that we treat. Really it’s just the way we make the incision, the way we expose the surgical target site, the area that we need to treat, and we do that through a variety of actually very simple means, but these small changes make really big differences in patient outcome.

About Dr. Kim, M.D.:
Dr. Choll Kim graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School and completed his fellowship training in complex spine surgery at the Mayo Clinic. He is board certified by American Board of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Dr. Kim is a nationally known expert in the modern field of computer-assisted minimally invasive spine surgery. He has trained specialists throughout the country on the safe and effective application of state-of-the-art techniques using image guidance and navigation technologies.

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• Bones & Joints