Minimally Invasive Procedure Could Put An End To Mystery Back Pain

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Back pain affects everyone at some point. Usually it's due to a bulging disk or some other spinal problem, but sometimes the source is a mystery.

As CBS2's Dr. Max Gomez explained, about 1 in 4 cases of back pain come from an area known as the sacro-iliac or SI joint.

If that's the pain source, there's now a minimally invasive way to fix the pain.

Karen Charles knows back pain. She's had multiple spine operations, herniated disks, vertebral fusions, and nerve ablations, but this pain was different.

"It was over here, like where you hip is on your back, and it was a sharp pain, almost like someone shot a bullet into you, and if you touched it you would jump," she said.

It turned out her pain was different. It was coming from her SI joint where the sacrum at the bottom of the spine meets the pelvic bones.

"This joint shouldn't move. When for any reason this joint starts moving a little bit -- it could be an accident, it could be a disease -- then it could be very painful," Dr. Fabien Bitan said.

In the past when physical therapy and injections failed, surgery to fuse the SI joint would be used as a last resort because it was a major operation with many possible complications and long rehab.

Now, there's a way to fuse those joints that's minimally invasive.

"We do everything under x-rays. We don't expose the joint, and everything is done with basically no risk of bleeding or any major complication," Dr. Bitan said.

Through small incisions in the top of the buttocks, three or four triangular rods are inserted across the SI joint. That fuses the joint, stopping the motion that caused the pain.

Even more amazing is the recovery time. Karen went home the same day of her surgery.

"I slept in the car on the way home. We had a little kid's mattress in the back seat," she said.

A two year follow up Dr. Bitan just published showed that Karen's experience was fairly typical and pain relief is lasting.

"I never needed a pain pill. It was amazing to me. It never hurt," she said.

The trick is figuring out that it's the SI joint causing the pain, and of course not everyone needs surgery for SI joint pain.