Bone graft harvest site pain after spine fusion?

Your back is healing from spine fusion, but the spot on your hip where they took bone graft hurts more than the surgery site. It is a common complaint among Bon Secours Mercy Health patients. There is a way to avoid that second wound.

When surgeons take bone from your hip for a spinal fusion, they create a second surgical site. That site can hurt for months, even years. Some patients feel a deep ache, numbness, or a tender scar that snags on clothing. The pain often outlasts the back pain. It happens because the iliac crest has many nerve endings and the bone removal creates a defect that heals slowly.

Avoiding the hip harvest eliminates the extra incision, the extra scar, and the extra recovery time. You trade one wound for one wound instead of two. The trade-off is a synthetic bone graft like ACTIFUSE. It is a man-made material that looks and acts like natural bone. It fills the space in your spine and fuses the vertebrae without taking anything from your hip. In a large Johns Hopkins review of 694 patients, ACTIFUSE had a 93% fusion rate, the same as BMP-2, with less reported back pain.

If you are facing a revision or a first-time fusion in Bon Secours Mercy Health, ask your surgeon about ACTIFUSE. Elite Surgical supplies the graft to local hospitals, covers the case in the OR, and in-services the staff. You do not need a second surgery site. You do not need to live with hip pain on top of back recovery. The product is on-label for posterolateral fusion with instrumentation.

Once the hip harvest is off the table, you focus on one thing: your spine healing. No extra scar, no donor site ache, no extra pain medication. The fusion rate stays high. The recovery gets simpler. That is the end state.