Word: disks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...also free-lances in a Feelies spur group called Yung Wu and holds down a part-time job as a shipping clerk. Million, the only married band member, has a seven- year-old son and works behind the register at northern New Jersey's only rent- a-laser-disk store. Drummer Stan Demeski, 28, moved out of his mother's home only this spring, and Bass Player Brenda Sauter, 29, does free-lance photography jobs. The band is going on its most extensive tour in October, and Sauter has promised herself that life will be only music from then...
...back operation, performed through a tiny incision, allows disk patients to go home with little pain and no stitches...
...there is a new and far less traumatic option for some disk patients. Known as percutaneous automated diskectomy, it is an outpatient procedure performed under local anesthesia through a tiny (2 mm long) incision in the back. Developed by Radiologist Gary Onik and Neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, the operation breezed through its clinical trials, and has been performed on some 15,000 patients around the country -- at approximately one-third the cost of conventional surgery...
...relatively simple operation is similar to arthroscopic surgery, in which damaged tissue is removed, typically from knee joints, through a hollow tube. In the diskectomy technique, a stainless-steel tube, guided by X ray, is slipped into the incision until the tip of the instrument rests against the disk. Next the surgeon threads a combination cutting-suction device the diameter of a pencil lead down the cannula, pushes it gently into the center of the disk and steps on a floor pedal. Suction draws disk material, which has the texture of crab meat, into a porthole near the probe...
Despite its high marks, the new operation can be less successful than a laminectomy and is not for everyone. Onik says it works only for a "contained" rupture -- a disk that has become distended but has not yet broken through the fibers that hold its contents in place. Moreover, 12% to 15% of Onik's patients require a second operation, usually a laminectomy, because X rays failed to reveal that the tissue had already burst out of the disk and lodged against a nerve. An additional 10% experience only partial relief but are not in enough pain to want another...