"These procedures are amazing, when you look at how well patients do," says Rex Marco, MD, chief of spine surgery and musculoskeletal oncology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. "They're often in terrible, terrible pain, and it's not going away. But with two small incisions we can take care of something that needed a huge operation in the past but without really good results."
"We do everything we can to make the operation go as smoothly as possible," says Marco. "Antibiotics decrease the chance of infection. And a special x-ray machine helps us get the needle into the bone and assure that cement goes into the bone and stays in the bone."