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Opioid-free Spine Surgery

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Opioid-Free Spine Surgery · Dr. Hooman Melamed on YouTube

Published on YouTube Length 0:59

About this video

Dr. Melamed explains his approach of looking at the patient as a whole, not just the spine. He says that for some time most of his spine surgery patients, including major scoliosis cases, have had surgery without narcotics. In his experience those patients have less pain, recover faster and avoid fogginess, stomach issues and constipation, which he links to less disruption of the gut.

Medically reviewed by Dr. Hooman Melamed, MD, FAAOS

Transcript

From the video's automatic YouTube captions, edited for punctuation, capitalization and paragraph breaks. Filler sounds such as "um" are left out, and clearly misheard names and medical terms are corrected. Words that could not be made out are marked [inaudible].

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As patients know, my philosophy is always look at the patient as a whole, not just focus on the spine. And I do believe in holistic, homeopathic, what I call integrative functional approach, where for quite some time now, I would say probably over 90 of my patients who’ve had spine surgery, and I’m talking major scoliosis operation, without giving him a narcotic.

And guess what? Since I’ve been doing the non-narcotic, patients have less pain than before when they were getting narcotics, and their recovery is much faster. They don’t have fogginess, they don’t have stomach issues, they don’t have the constipation issues, and the pain gets less, recover faster, heal faster, because we’re not disrupting the gut as much. These narcotics really destroy one’s guts.

So I feel this non-narcotic approach is the way to go with any surgery, and this is something we can achieve in the United States.

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