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For people in San Antonio who did the surgery — and still hurt

You did the hardest part.You're still in pain. Now what?

Bring us the whole story Start with who we won't treat

Doctors call it failed back surgery syndrome — pain that keeps going, or comes back, after spine surgery. It is common enough to have a name. It is not your fault, not your surgeon's failure, and not in your head. What it needs now is an real sorting: what is causing the pain today, which treatments are real options for a spine that's already been operated on — and which ones a clinic should refuse to sell you. We've been sorting exactly this for 21 years.

23 years in practice
21 years using the DRX9000
2,000+ patients treated on it

Nobody signs up for spine surgery lightly.

You did the therapy first. The shots. The waiting. The months of being told to give it time. Surgery was the serious answer — the one you agreed to after you'd run out of other answers.

And maybe it worked for a while. Maybe you had a few good months and let yourself believe it was over. Then the familiar ache crept back into the same spot. Or a new pain showed up somewhere it had never been. Or you reached for something ordinary — a dog, a suitcase, a grandchild — and felt that sickening pop, and knew instantly what it was.

Now you're somewhere worse than where you started. Not because the pain is worse. Because the big option is spent. Your surgeon may have offered a revision — a bigger surgery to fix the first one — and everybody you know has an opinion about that, and a horror story to go with it. You've read that back surgeries "never work." You've added up what you've already spent. And half the internet suddenly wants to sell you a miracle, precisely because you're desperate.

So let's start with two things that are true.

Your surgery was not a stupid decision. You made it with the information you had, for real reasons, usually after everything gentler had failed. Surgery fixes structure, and it often fixes it well. What surgery cannot do is take the load off your spine forever, stop time at the level above, or make a nerve unlearn something it's been doing for two years. Pain afterward means something specific happened. It does not mean you chose wrong.

And your pain is real. If you've been told your scan "looks fine" and left the appointment feeling like you were being called a liar — that appointment was about the limits of the picture, not the limits of your straight talk.

Here is our promise for this page: no miracle talk — just a straight sort of which post-surgical spines we can help. Many are.

Start here

Why the pain came back — the four usual reasons

"Failed back surgery" isn't one problem. It's a label for four very different problems that happen to share a scar. Almost every patient we see is one of these — or two of them at once.

Jump to the one that sounds like yours: the same disc, again · the level next door · scar tissue with a nerve caught in it · a nerve that learned the pain

1. The same disc, again

This is the most common story we hear.

A discectomy removes the piece of disc that broke loose and pressed on your nerve. It's very good at that, and it's why so many people wake up with their leg pain gone. But understand what the operation is: the surgeon takes out the fragment. Nobody rebuilds the disc.

What's left is a disc that's thinner than it was, with a weak spot in its outer wall where the material escaped, sitting between the same two bones, under the same load it lost to the first time. The desk hasn't changed. Gravity hasn't changed. So the disc keeps losing height — or a piece pushes out through that same weak spot, often during something completely ordinary. That's the pop, and the flood of recognizable leg pain right behind it.

The straight answer here: this is the version of failed back surgery most likely to have a non-surgical option left, because the problem is still mechanical — pressure on a disc that never got unloaded. If there's no hardware at that level, decompression is genuinely on the table — we treat post-discectomy patients all the time. Your exam and your current imaging still make the final call, and we'll come back to what that involves.

2. The level next door

A fusion welds two vertebrae into one bone. Done right, that segment stops moving — which is the entire point, because its movement was what hurt.

But your back still has to bend the same amount to tie your shoes. That motion has to come from somewhere. So the levels above and below the fusion take over the share the fused level used to carry — more work, every day, for years. Eventually those neighbors wear faster than they should have. The disc above the fusion flattens. The joints behind it get arthritic and thick. Surgeons call this adjacent segment disease, and it usually shows up years later: new pain, often slightly higher up your back, in a spot the first surgery never touched.

This is not a mistake anybody made. It's physics, your surgeon knew about it, and it was part of the trade they weighed before recommending the fusion in the first place.

The straight answer here: this is the hardest call we make, and it is never made over the phone. Treating a level that sits right beside welded bone and metal is not the same as treating a normal spine. It's possible — but very case-by-case, and the deciding question is the stability of your fusion, read from your imaging and your exam together. Sometimes there's something safe and useful to do. Sometimes the straight answer is that this belongs back with a surgeon — or with nobody, for now.

3. Scar tissue with a nerve caught in it

Everything you heal makes scar. Skin, muscle, and the tissue around your nerve roots too. That's normal healing, not a complication.

The trouble is what scar does to a nerve. A healthy nerve root isn't fixed in place — it slides a little every time you lift your leg or bend forward, the way a rope runs through a pulley. When scar forms around it, the nerve gets tethered. Now movement that used to be free tugs on a nerve that can't move, and you get pain with position and activity that no pill quite reaches.

Here's the part nobody explains: cutting scar out makes more scar. That's why surgeons are cautious about reoperating when scar is the main finding. A second operation to free the nerve creates a fresh healing site — and fresh healing is exactly what made the scar.

The straight answer here: nobody can remove scar tissue from around your nerve without surgery, and surgery is a poor trade for scar alone. Be extremely careful with anyone selling you something that "dissolves scar tissue" or "releases adhesions" — that's a marketing claim, not a mechanism. What can change is the load on that segment, the inflammation around the nerve, and how well the nerve moves in the space it has. That's a real conversation. "We'll melt the scar" is not.

4. A nerve that learned the pain

This is the one that gets missed most, and the one that makes patients feel crazy.

A nerve that's been squeezed for a long time doesn't just report pain — it changes. The pathway gets more sensitive, the volume gets turned up in the spinal cord and the brain, and after a while the alarm keeps ringing whether or not there's still a fire. Doctors call it central sensitization. Patients describe it better: burning, electric, constant, there when you wake at 4am, there when you're sitting still, there in a leg where the pressure came off two years ago.

A few signs give it away. The pain stops following position and activity the way it used to. Light touch — a sock, a bedsheet, the seam of your jeans — can set it off. And your imaging looks better than you feel, which is why somebody has probably already told you your scan is fine.

The straight answer here: no amount of structural fixing quiets this. Not decompression. Not another operation. Not injections aimed at a disc that's no longer the problem. When the signal itself is the disease, the treatment has to aim at the signal — and that's a different lane, which we'll get to below.

Most people have more than one of these.

A re-herniated disc with a sensitized nerve on top of it is an extremely common combination — and the reason people get half-better and then stall. Sorting takes an exam and your imaging together. It cannot be done from a form, a phone call, or this page.

The refusals come first

The real sorting — where each cause actually leads

If you have a fusion or hardware at the level in question, we will not put you on the decompression table. No exceptions.

Read that twice, because it's the single most useful sentence on this page.

Dr. Barton using a spine model to explain which levels were operated on and which weren't.
The sorting starts here: what was fused, what was left alone, and which level is actually generating the pain now.

Pulling on a fused or instrumented segment is something we simply will not do. A welded level cannot open the way a natural segment can, and traction on hardware risks the very structures the surgery was meant to protect. That's why the screen comes first here, every time — the exam and your imaging decide, before anyone discusses treatment.

A fusion at the treated level rules decompression out here — no exceptions, no matter how much anyone wants it to work.

If your problem is mechanical and there's no hardware at that level — the same disc again, or a level breaking down under load — the DRX9000 program is a real option, not a long shot: unloading the disc that's still fighting the same losing battle, this time with the pressure actually taken off.12 We treat patients after a discectomy or laminectomy all the time; your operative report and current imaging still decide, but "I've had surgery on that disc" does not close the door. Published decompression cohorts have included carefully screened patients with prior spine surgery.6 "Carefully" is the whole word. We evaluate post-surgical spines more cautiously than anyone else we see.

If your problem is nerve pain that's become its own disease — burning, electric, constant pain long after the structure was addressed — decompression is the wrong tool, because the problem isn't pressure anymore. This is where scrambler therapy belongs: a non-invasive, FDA-cleared treatment designed to retrain the pain signal rather than mask it, built for exactly this kind of stuck, chronic nerve pain.

And here's the part worth saying out loud: it's the straight thing to try before you commit to an implanted spinal cord stimulator. A stimulator is surgery, hardware in your back, a trial period and a battery. Scrambler is none of those, and you'll know within a handful of sessions whether your nerves respond. Trying the non-invasive option first is simply the right order. Scrambler therapy.

If what you actually need is a surgeon, we'll say so — and we'll say it on the first visit, not after we've sold you eight weeks of something. See the second-opinion answer in the questions below.

New loss of bladder or bowel control, rapidly worsening weakness in a leg, or numbness in the groin, the inner thighs, or the area you sit on — what doctors call saddle anesthesia → emergency room today, not an appointment. That's true for anyone, and it's doubly true after spine surgery.

The mechanism

How the decompression program works

The DRX9000 is an FDA-cleared, computer-controlled system that applies a precise, gentle, rhythmic pull to one specific level of your spine. Unloading the disc that way creates a vacuum effect inside it — measured inside human discs at −100 to −160 mm Hg in the original pressure study.1 Under that negative pressure, fluid and nutrients can move back into a disc that's been squeezed dry, and disc material can begin to retract off the nerve.2

Alongside decompression, the program includes a core strengthening and therapy phase — rebuilding the support around the segment so it isn't relying on a disc that's already been operated on. Both are integral. This is one program with two phases, not a series of decompression sessions. The DRX9000 page — the program in full.

A Texas Spine Clinic team member fitting the DRX9000 pelvic harness around a patient's hips before treatment.
Getting set up. Fully clothed — the pelvic harness goes on over your own clothes before you lie down.
A patient lying on the DRX9000 table while a team member sets the console and Dr. Huffman reviews her chart.
On the table. About 25–30 minutes. The pull is aimed at the one level being treated, on a force curve set by hand and adjusted as you respond.

"Isn't this just traction?"

Traction pulls. Pull hard on a spine and the muscles around it fight back, so you end up stretching muscle instead of unloading a disc. The DRX measures resistance many times a second and adjusts the force curve to stay under that guarding threshold, at a set angle, aimed at one level. That engineering is the difference between stretching muscle and actually unloading a disc.

"How do I know it will be done right?"

Ask us the hard questions — we like them. Here's how care is decided here, and you can hold us to every line: a doctor reviews your actual imaging before anyone discusses a plan or a price. A disc is never diagnosed from an X-ray, because an X-ray can't show one. The exam decides who is treated — and "no" is an answer we genuinely give. And your cost is in writing before your program begins.

"Why does it take so many visits?"

Because the disc is avascular, meaning it has no blood vessels of its own, which is why it's one of the slowest-healing structures in your body. It rehydrates slowly and adapts slowly. The program typically runs 20–25 sessions over 6–8 weeks, about 25–30 minutes on the table each time. Nobody has found a straight way to shorten that. The part that actually protects you is the checkpoint — ours is below.

"Won't pulling on my back hurt where I was cut?"

It's the right question, and it's why we want your operative report rather than just your MRI. Where the surgery was, what was removed, what was left, and whether anything was instrumented all change the answer. In most post-surgical spines without hardware, careful unloading is reasonable — we do it all the time. Where there's fusion or hardware at that level, it isn't, and no amount of care makes it reasonable.

Weigh it against the alternative

The case for trying this before another operation

Weigh what this asks of you against what the last one did. No incision. No anesthesia. No new hardware. No new scar tissue — and scar is the thing your spine already has too much of. No narcotics and nothing to wean off. No recovery period, and no time off work — sessions run about half an hour and you drive yourself home.

And it takes nothing off the table. If you ever do need a revision, this hasn't changed that conversation by a single degree. The reverse isn't true, and you already know it: the second operation is harder than the first, and the third is harder than the second. Trying the reversible thing first isn't giving up on surgery. It's protecting the option.

Why this works

Why this works — and who we won't treat

This is a program, and the early weeks can flare

Patients in the published record and in our own practice describe pain that gets worse before it turns — often around sessions three to six — and then eases somewhere past session seven to eleven. Satisfied patients regularly say they nearly quit. We'd rather you hear that now than discover it at session four and decide we lied to you.

The checkpoint

We assess whether your spine is responding around the second week, after eight to ten sessions. If it isn't, we say so then — not after another month of visits — and you don't pay for the rest.

Texas law is on your side here, not just our word

Chiropractic care in Texas must be prorated. You never pay for treatment you don't receive, and if you prepaid, the unused portion comes back to you. No legal chiropractic contract in this state can be a non-refundable block of visits.

Who we won't treat

  • Fusion or hardware at the level being treated — no exceptions.
  • Severe osteoporosis
  • Spinal fracture, tumor or infection
  • Severe bony stenosis — that's a surgical problem and we refer it.
  • Unstable spondylolisthesis — a slip that shifts more than 5 mm on the flexion-and-extension X-rays we take to check; a stable slip, of any grade, can still be a candidate.
  • Pregnancy
  • Any of the cauda equina warning signs above, which belong in an emergency room and not in any clinic's schedule.
  • And on top of all of that, for post-surgical patients specifically: anything where your operative history and your imaging don't line up well enough for us to be confident. Uncertainty is a "no" here.

What we stand behind

You have been promised an outcome before, so we won't do that. What we will do is look at what your surgery actually changed and what it didn't, tell you straight whether the levels we'd treat can respond, and say no if they can't — we turn patients away every week. The evaluation has three possible answers: here's what we can treat and why, this needs your surgeon, or this needs watching rather than selling.

What it costs

You'll have your figure in writing before you commit to anything.

The decompression program isn't a covered benefit under any plan. If you carry a commercial health plan, we can usually generate an insurance credit through it, which we apply against your cost. How big that credit is depends on your specific benefits. So expect an out-of-pocket investment, and expect to know exactly what it is before you commit. We verify your benefits at no charge, paying at time of service earns a discount, and CareCredit, Affirm and in-office payment plans are available. You only ever pay for care you actually receive — if you paid ahead and the program stops being right for you, the unused portion comes back to you. Cost & Insurance — how the investment works.

And we bring some mileage to that judgement. Dr. Barton has been in practice since 2003 and has run this machine since 2005 — 21 years and more than 2,000 patients on the DRX9000. That's long enough to know which spines respond to it and which ones don't, and to tell you which one you are early instead of late.

Why it works when it works

The two reasons this program works when it works

The first is the machine — and knowing how to run it. The DRX9000 is genuinely effective at what it does, but owning one and knowing how to use it are different things. Every protocol is set by hand: the angle of pull, the force curve, the specific level being treated, adjusted as your spine responds week to week. We've been doing that for 21 years. That experience is the difference between a table and a treatment.

The second matters just as much, and almost nobody in this industry will tell you about it:

We screen patients the way a spine surgeon screens surgical candidates.

We have turned away more patients than we can count — including people who pushed, pleaded and offered to pay in full. Saying no costs us money every time. It's also the only reason we've been able to do this for 21 years and still have the reputation we have.

The exam and your imaging — not the machine, and not your credit card — decide whether someone is treated here. For a post-surgical spine, add one more document: your operative report.

Kevin S. Barton, D.C., testing a patient's knee reflex with a reflex hammer.
Reflexes and sensation. What the nerve is doing now — not what it was doing before your surgery.
Kevin S. Barton, D.C., raising a patient's straight leg during an examination to test for nerve tension.
The positions that provoke it. Straight-leg raising and the rest of the exam tell us which structure is still under load — read together with your imaging.

The refusals are the offer

The rules we work by

  • We won't decompress a fusion. No exceptions. Worth repeating a third time.
  • We won't treat you off a phone call or a website quiz. No price is quoted here before your imaging has been looked at by a doctor. If anyone quotes you a program price before they've seen your scan, you've learned something important about them.
  • We won't sell you a scar-tissue miracle. No treatment on earth dissolves epidural scar.
  • We won't start before we've reviewed your operative history and your imaging — the post-surgical MRI included, which is genuinely harder to read than a spine that's never been operated on. Bring everything. We'll go through it with you, out loud.
  • We won't tell you decompression is the answer when your problem is a signal problem — or that scrambler is the answer when your problem is still mechanical. Those are different lanes, and pretending otherwise is how patients waste a year.
  • We won't talk you out of a revision surgery you genuinely need. We're a middle step, not the anti-surgeons. Sometimes the straight answer is a second surgical opinion, and we'll say that too.

Worth knowing

Your post-surgical MRI is harder to read — here's why that matters

Before surgery, a herniated disc on an MRI is fairly obvious: something is where it shouldn't be, pressing on something it shouldn't touch. After surgery, the picture gets complicated.

Scar tissue and recurrent disc material can sit in the same place and look similar. Telling them apart usually takes contrast — scar takes up contrast dye because it has a blood supply, and disc material doesn't — so if your MRI was done without contrast, that distinction may simply not be in the picture. Hardware creates glare on the images around it. Anatomy that was removed on purpose can read as damage to someone without the operative note in front of them. And normal post-surgical change near the scar looks alarming on paper when it isn't.

This is why "your MRI looks fine" so often lands on a patient who very much does not feel fine. It usually means "I don't see a new structural problem" — real information, and also perfectly compatible with a tethered nerve root or a sensitized pain pathway, neither of which shows up well on any scan.

So when we ask for the operative report, the pre-op imaging and the post-op imaging, it isn't paperwork for its own sake. Read together, those three answer what none of them answers alone: what was actually done, what changed, and what's new since.

And one more promise about that stack of imaging. Patients tell us the same thing all the time: nobody ever showed them the pictures. There's a reason. The doctor most trained to read your MRI — the radiologist — writes the report and never meets you. The doctors who do meet you usually work from that report, and a surgeon's schedule rarely has room to sit down and walk through the images with you. Nobody did anything wrong — and you still ended up owning a spine you've never seen. After surgery, that goes double.

We think that's backwards. Your consultation happens in front of a screen with your MRI on it. We go through the pictures — not just the report — and show you what's pressing on what, why it hurts the way it does, and exactly what we plan to do about it. You leave understanding what your spine looks like and how we intend to fix it.

Your imaging goes up on the screen and we read it with you — level by level, pre-op beside post-op.
Kevin S. Barton, D.C., taking notes during a patient consultation.
The history first. What the surgery was for, what it changed, what it didn't — written down as you tell it, then read against the films.

The research

What it looks like in numbers

Start with the part that applies to you.

The research on decompression covers disc-related back and leg pain — and it has included patients who had already had spine surgery. Here's what it shows.

And the part that matters to you: the published study of the DRX9000 by name included patients who had already had spine surgery — about 13% of the group.6 Carefully screened post-surgical patients are part of the published record.

On scrambler therapy, we're keeping this page structural on purpose: it's non-invasive, FDA-cleared, and aimed at retraining the pain signal rather than masking it. The published evidence for it is discussed on its own page, where the numbers and their limits belong.

The vacuum effect was measured, not imagined. Researchers publishing in the Journal of Neurosurgery put pressure sensors inside human lumbar discs during decompression and recorded the pressure dropping to −100 to −160 mm Hg1 — a true vacuum, measured inside a living disc.

Herniations shrank more than with a sham treatment. In a randomized trial of real decompression against a sham — so patients couldn't tell which they got — the herniation index fell 27.6% with real treatment against 7.1% with sham, with better leg pain and disability scores at follow-up.3

Discs measurably gained height. Thirty patients scanned before and after a six-week DRX9000 program showed average disc height rising 7.5 mm → 8.8 mm, with pain falling 6.2 → 1.6 out of 10 — and the two changes tracked together.2

Leg pain responded most. In 73 patients compared against physiotherapy plus conventional traction, radiating leg pain and disc height improved far more with decompression.5

Across working clinics. The largest recent series followed 267 patients across multiple clinics: average pain fell from 6.9 to 2.5, with measurable improvement in reflexes and daily function.4

What the change looks like on MRI

Before-and-after sagittal lumbar MRI scans shown side by side, with the herniated disc visibly reduced in the second scan.
Before and after, side-on. Imaging is how disc change is measured in the studies on this page — and how your own progress gets shown to you rather than described to you.
Before-and-after axial lumbar MRI scans of the same patient, seen from above, with a red arrow marking the same spot on each.
The same disc from above — the arrow marks the same spot on both scans, before and after a course on the DRX9000.

Who you'll see

Your care team

We work as a team. Dr. Barton and Dr. Huffman have practiced side by side for more than 18 years, and your care is a team effort from your first visit.

Dr. Kevin S. Barton, D.C.

Kevin S. Barton, D.C.

Chiropractor · In practice since 2003

Dr. Barton has been in practice since 2003 and has used the DRX9000 since 2005, with more than 2,000 patients treated on it. He's the author of the treatment philosophy here: find the source of the pain and treat it there, without surgery and without narcotics. He completed advanced scrambler therapy training in Rome with Dr. Giuseppe Marineo, the inventor of the treatment.

In 2025 he went through the DRX9000 program himself, for one of the worst herniated discs he'd seen in his career, and filmed the whole course of treatment, MRIs included. Watch his nine-part series.

Dr. Joshua C. Huffman, D.C.

Joshua C. Huffman, D.C.

Chiropractor · In practice since 2007

Dr. Huffman earned his Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Texas Chiropractic College in Pasadena, Texas, and completed his internship at Moody Health Center, with a rotation at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston. He has advanced training in myofascial release technique and is certified as a designated doctor for the State of Texas.

A Texas native, he was born and raised in Matagorda County. When he isn't getting patients well, he's hunting, fishing, kayaking and hiking with his wife, Kendra, and their two children, Titus and Alley.

How the program runs

Decompression and strengthening, together

Decompression is the part people picture. It isn't the part that keeps the result.

Running alongside decompression, from as early as your symptoms allow, is core strengthening and therapy aimed at the support your spine has been missing — after surgery, usually more than you'd think. Muscles that spent a year guarding an injury don't switch back on by themselves, and a segment beside a scar needs help carrying its share.

We re-examine on a schedule and show you what's changed instead of asking you to take it on faith. If something flares later, you come in and we look at it. That's not a failure, and it's not a new program.

After the program ends, periodic maintenance treatments matter — for a post-surgical spine more than most. Taking the pressure off from time to time is how you protect the margin you rebuilt, and we'll recommend the schedule that fits your case, with the reasoning out loud.
DRX9000 spinal decompression tables in the Texas Spine Clinic treatment room, in front of the clinic's logo wall.
Our DRX9000 room. Decompression and the strengthening work are parts of one program, running together.
The rehabilitation room at Texas Spine Clinic: therapy tables, a stationary bike, exercise balls and training equipment.
The rehab room. Where the strength that holds the result gets built.

Patients

Patient stories

Video thumbnail: Elaine Wild — how she avoided surgery for a 10 mm disc herniation.
Elaine WildResearch scientist — a 10 mm herniation, no surgery. She read the research herself before she agreed to anything.
Video thumbnail: Cameron Beckman — how he avoided back surgery.
Cameron BeckmanPGA golfer — drop foot resolved, won a Champions Tour event at 51.
Video thumbnail: Breanne Weber — no back surgery, back to jump squats.
Breanne WeberFitness instructor — back to jump squats within three months.
Video thumbnail: From a pain level of 10 to running his ranch again.
The rancherPain level 10 — back to running his ranch.
Video thumbnail: Rick — from a ruptured disc back to the tennis court.
RickRuptured disc — back on the tennis court.
Video thumbnail: How he avoided back surgery after nine months of pain.
Nine months of painSurgery avoided after nine months of it.
Video thumbnail: Herniated disc at 24 — how she avoided surgery.
Herniated at 24Young, herniated, and told surgery was next. It wasn’t.
Video thumbnail: He was told he needed back surgery — what he did instead.
Told he needed surgeryHe did this instead.
Video thumbnail: Chef Andrea — how we helped her avoid neck surgery.
Chef AndreaA neck case — three-level fusion avoided.
4.6 out of 5 · 112 reviews on Google
“I am so grateful to Dr. Huffman and Texas Spine Clinic for offering Non-Surgical Spinal Decompression treatment. After a few short series of treatments, I always leave pain-free… The team, the physical therapists and Jennifer (the receptionist), are so attentive and caring.”
Katie Breedlove · Posted on Google
“When I started the program, I was in pain all day and had trouble sleeping at night due to pain. I was using a walker at home and struggled with a cane when I went to the doctor. I was confined at home with pain killers. Now, I don’t take pain medication… I have made so much progress, and my activity level has improved greatly.”
Betty Cisnero · Posted on Google
“Dr. [Huffman] and his Physical Therapists have been dedicated in healing my back and sciatica problems. I appreciate all that they have done in helping my relieve my pain and suffering They communicate well and I can’t say enough how they have helped my healing process.”
Alfred Hawkins · Posted on Google

Reviews quoted verbatim from our public Google profile.

Individual results vary. These are real Texas Spine Clinic patients who consented to share their stories — watch them tell it in their own words.

Questions patients actually ask

Before you call

Everyone says back surgeries never work. Was mine a mistake?

Probably not — and the internet's math is skewed. People whose surgeries worked are out living their lives; people still hurting are posting. Surgery fixes structure, and it often does that well. What it can't do is unload a spine, stop time at the level above, or make a nerve unlearn pain it's been sending for years. Continued pain means something specific is happening now. It doesn't mean you chose wrong then.

How soon after surgery could I be evaluated?

Roughly two to three months after the operation, depending on your situation — it's a case-by-case call, and your surgeon owns the healing window before it. The first months after an operation belong to their protocol, and we don't step on it — bone, disc and soft tissue are healing on a timeline nothing else should interrupt. If you're still inside that window and worried, the right call is to your surgeon's office, not to ours. Bring the operative report whenever you do come.

I have a fusion. Is there anything here for me?

Not the decompression table — not at the fused level, not for any price. What may still apply: if your pain is nerve pain that's become its own disease, scrambler therapy doesn't touch your spine mechanically at all, and a fusion doesn't rule it out. And if the level above or below your fusion is what's hurting, that's an evaluation — very case-by-case, and the deciding factor is how stable your fusion is. It's never answered over the phone. We'd rather you hear all of that from us than find a clinic willing to say yes to everything.

Would a spinal cord stimulator be better than scrambler therapy?

They aim at the same kind of pain from different directions. A stimulator is an implanted device: a surgery, a trial period, hardware and a battery you live with. Scrambler is non-invasive, with no implant, and you'll know within a handful of sessions whether you respond. Both help real people, and some patients end up with the stimulator anyway. Our view is only about sequence: the non-invasive trial belongs before the implant decision, not after it disappoints.

Is my pain just scar tissue? Can anything fix that?

Scar itself can't be removed without creating more scar, and anyone promising to dissolve it is selling you something. What can change is the load on the segment, the inflammation around the nerve, how well that nerve moves — and, when the nerve has learned the pain, the signal itself. Which of those applies to you is exactly what the evaluation is for.

When is a second surgical opinion the right answer?

More often than people think. Get one when there's a new or worsening neurological problem — foot drop, growing weakness, numbness that's spreading. When your imaging shows something structurally new, like a large recurrent herniation or instability at a level. When your surgeon has recommended a revision and you want that recommendation tested by someone with no stake in the first operation. And when you simply never got a clear explanation of what was done and why. Wanting a second opinion isn't disloyalty — surgeons ask for them constantly. We'll tell you plainly when we think you need one, including when the answer we'd like to give you isn't the one you need.

Do I need a new MRI?

If you haven't had an MRI since your surgery, then yes — and it needs to be done with and without contrast, because that's what separates scar tissue from a recurrent disc herniation. Those two look similar on a plain scan and they are not the same problem.

If you've already had one with and without contrast since the surgery, and it isn't more than a year or two old, we'll usually work from what you have.

We don't perform MRIs here, so there's nothing in it for us either way. We send you out for it, and then we read it with you.

What if you take me on and it doesn't work?

We typically see improvement after eight to ten sessions, and that's also the checkpoint: we reassess there. If your spine isn't responding, we tell you then — not after another month — and you'll know where that checkpoint is before you start.

Footnotes

  1. Ramos & Martin, J Neurosurgery 1994 — intradiscal pressure during vertebral axial decompression. usable data from three patients; the authors declared no financial interest. ↩
  2. Apfel et al., BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders 2010 — 30 patients, six-week DRX9000 program. ↩
  3. Choi et al., Int J Clinical Practice 2022 — randomized sham-controlled trial, 60 patients. no between-group difference in low-back-pain scores. ↩
  4. Schueren et al., Military Medicine 2025 — 267 patients across seven clinics. pain scores on file for 220 of 267 charts; its own authors call for randomized trials. ↩
  5. El-Zayat et al., Egyptian Rheumatology & Rehabilitation 2019 — 73 patients, decompression vs. physiotherapy with traction. ↩
  6. Macario et al., Pain Practice 2008 — the only published cohort of the DRX9000 by name, N=94. Cited here only for the composition fact that about 13% of the cohort had prior spine surgery — never for an outcome. ↩

Full citations on the evidence page.

The ask

Bring us the whole story — surgery and all.

Call (210) 741-9166 or send the form. The consultation is $49 — and it isn't a sales pitch. Here's exactly what happens:

  1. You bring three things: your imaging, your operative report, and every question you've been saving. If you can only get one, bring the imaging.
  2. We examine you and read your imaging with you — the pictures on the screen, not just the report, out loud, including the parts that are hard to read on a post-surgical spine.
  3. You get a straight answer about which of the four causes fits your pain, and which lane is straight for you — including the lanes that aren't ours.
  4. If the answer is yes, your first treatment is included. The $49 covers the examination, the imaging review and your first session on the table. If the answer is no, it's no.

You'll leave understanding your own spine either way. If the answer is no, it costs you one appointment instead of eight weeks.

Call (210) 741-9166 Request a consultation

Book your $49 consultation

No referral needed. Same-day appointments available.

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P.S. The cruelest thing about failed back surgery is what it does to hope. Once the "real fix" didn't fix it, every next option sounds like snake oil, and the smartest thing you own is now a reflex that says don't fall for anything again. Keep that reflex. Just aim it at one question: does this clinic sort patients, or sell them? Ask us what we won't treat. The answer takes about a minute, and you'll know everything you need to know about us.