Slinky, I'm so sorry you have to deal with this. I too suffer from thoracic spine issues and when it's bad... it's really bad. Also, when it's bad, the episodes are not short... they last for weeks and months. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything.
VATS took thoracic spine surgeons from the days of open thoracotomies (crack your chest open... split the sternum... move organs aside to get to the spine), to a much, much less invasive procedure that does not involve the open thoracotomy.
I am considering surgery in the T7-8 area but VATS is no longer state of the art for the surgery I need. I'm considering XLIF. Dr. Regan is also one of the early adopters of XLIF and has been doing them for years. BTW, when looking at the good and bad stories you read about a doctor, it's not like a tally or score sheet. It's important to consider each case individually and to learn to set aside "outliers" that have unique issues that make their cases less relevant or irrelevant to the decision you have to make.
I've been dealing with my T-Spine since 2009. Even before that, I've discovered that symptoms of mine that I had chalked up to my C-Spine were actually thoracic. I've been through a fairly exhaustive litany of diagnostic procedures that you might want to discuss with me. These have included facet injections, costovertebral joint injections and ablations, intercostal nerve blocks, a thoracic discogram and most recently thoracic epidurals. What has been difficult is that we have gotten some pretty amazing results, but have repeated the successful injections with little or no success for the subsequent procedures.
Call me if you wish... number on the ispine and GPN website contact pages.
Mark
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