When you are suffering from unrelenting back pain, you may feel as if you are willing to do anything to alleviate your pain, even if it means having back surgery. And when people think of back surgery, they often envision a spinal fusion–that is, a surgical procedure in which damaged portions of the spinal column are removed, and two or more vertebrae are treated so that they ultimately fuse together into one unit. However with current technology spinal fusions don’t have the same recovery as they used to, and most people are able to return to a high level of activity. 

The word arthroplasty means “artificial disc replacement,” or more specifically, the surgical reconstruction or replacement of a joint. When removing a damaged spinal disc and replacing it with a man-made prosthetic disc, that could be classified as cervical or lumbar arthroplasty. Read on to learn more about these procedures.