Easy Back Pain Fix

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) --  Medication, physical therapy, acupuncture. You’ve tried them all, yet the back pain lingers! Is the next step surgery? Not necessarily. Before you go under the knife, you may want to consider one more option.

Snapshots are all Canadian Dina Bezic has left of what was once a very active life. Back pain from a car accident forced this highly decorated police officer from street patrol to a desk job. “Extending my arms out would hurt. Sitting would hurt. Socializing would hurt,” Bezic says. “To this day, I still get pretty emotional about it, because it was my life.”

That life is slowly coming back, thanks to John Regan, M.D., a spinal surgeon at the Pacific Coast Spine Institute in Beverly Hills, Calif., and a tiny experimental band called the Wallis System.

“We wanted to do something that would have continuous motion and be minimally invasive,” Dr. Regan says. “Basically, a band-aid procedure [that would allow Bezic to] go home the same day.”

Through a tiny incision, Dr. Regan implanted a plastic block between the vertebrae in Bezic’s spine. A band holds it in place, so when Bezic moves, it acts like a shock absorber that takes pressure off the injured disc. The big benefit? The system can be removed or adjusted if further surgery is necessary.

A year after surgery, Bezic can now sit for more than 15 minutes at a time, which she says is major progress. “I still get some tightness in my hips, and I still get some back pain,” Bezic says. “But it’s not that deep, debilitating pain I used to have.”

Patrolling the streets of Vancouver will have to wait while Bezic works to strengthen her back. But after six years of pain, she’s happy with every pain-free move she makes.

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