You don't need surgery!

I was going to turn off the computer, but then I checked this article about surgery for herniated disks.

Apparently, surgery is unnecessary, since with time one will recover. And of course it takes a while to recover from surgery!

Patients who had surgery often reported immediate relief. But by three to six months, patients in both groups reported marked improvement.

After two years, about 70 percent of the patients in the two groups said they had a “major improvement” in their symptoms. No one who waited had serious consequences, and no one who had surgery had a disastrous result.

Many surgeons had long feared that waiting would cause severe harm, but those fears were proved unfounded.

About 40 percent of those assigned to surgery decided not to have it, often because their conditions improved while they awaited the operations. A third of patients assigned to wait decided to have operations, often because their pain was so bad that they could not endure it any longer.

So there's no need for surgery if you can deal with the pain.