Patient Education

One of the primary goals of the Mt. Tam Spine Center is to educate our patients about their condition and treatment options. Depending on the condition, several treatment options may be recommended by the physicians and surgeons in our practice. The best available evidence for treatments including the use of new technologies is not from advertisements or from websites, but rather from data available through evidence based medicine. This evidence comes from clinical outcome studies performed by physicians who subsequently report the results in journals which focus specifically on the spine. 

We believe that these studies are the only reliable source of clinical information; they can be found by searching the National Library of Medicine at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.  We understand that it may be difficult for patients to understand the technical medical terms in these publications. As such, we see it as our duty to help condense this information and explain it in a way that patients can understand.  In this way, we believe that we are providing patients with the best available evidence for their treatment options.

Drs. Byers and Su, in their quest to contribute to the study of spine surgery, also collect standardized patient outcome scores on all patients undergoing spine surgery. Use of this data enables physicians to tell their patients what they can expect their level of improvement to be after surgery. An example of an outcome predictor following surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis can be found at http://caligari.dartmouth.edu:8080/Sport4/SportPF.  

In addition to interpreting clinical outcome studies, we have also provided custom animations about spinal conditions and treatment options below that are commonly recommended by the physicians and surgeons in our practice.

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