Tom Carter couldn’t have predicted that the extreme pain he felt when he turned his neck, and the associated numbness and loss of strength in his left arm, would lead him from his Chicago home to a solution offered in Santa Barbara.
But he’s glad he found his way here, because the original path he anticipated taking to treat his “severely pinched nerve” alarmed him.
Dr. Thomas Jones, medical director of the Santa Barbara Neuroscience Institute at Cottage Health, welcomed the opportunity to address Carter’s issue without what the doctor describes as costly and more dangerous “overtreatment.”
In turn, his patient hopes telling his story will encourage others in his situation to approach invasive spinal surgery with caution.
“I wanted to help somebody else in the way Dr. Jones helped me,” Carter said.
In March, Carter began to suffer pain and sleepless nights as a result of a narrowed nerve canal. Collapsing spinal discs potentially complicated the situation, and the specialist he saw in Chicago recommended difficult surgery that involved fusing several disc segments in the lower part of his neck.
Carter would have faced up to six months of recovery. He worried it might stretch even longer and that his days of skiing moguls and playing weekend soccer would be over, just as he prepared to celebrate his 50th birthday.
“What I had was not life threatening, but in some ways, I felt like my life was ending,” he said.
From MRI scans and a phone consultation, Jones confirmed an outpatient, single disc level foramenotomy could work on its own in Carter’s case, without disc fusion, and scheduled it quickly in Santa Barbara for the end of May.
Jones performs the minimally invasive surgery several times a week, and while he doesn’t market himself to out-of-state patients for foramenotomy or other procedures, he has taken referrals from other parts of the country and the world.
Carter didn’t mind traveling to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, where he reports “everything was awesome,” or celebrating his birthday in Santa Barbara as he recovered in June.
“When I woke up from surgery, the pain and the numbness and the tingling in my arm was gone,” he reported just a few weeks later. “I feel great, and I can honestly say that I feel better today than I have in three to four months.”
With the nerve freed up, Carter’s collapsed discs do not appear to be causing him additional problems.
“Dr. Jones made a statement to me afterward, which I really have taken to heart,” he explained. “He said, ‘Treat the symptoms and not the scan.’”