Editorial standards

Who writes and reviews these articles

Every article is written and reviewed by practising spine surgeons — clinicians who spend their working week assessing these problems and performing these operations. Nothing here is spun out of a content brief by someone who has never seen the condition it describes.

You will not find a byline, a photograph or a list of credentials on any page, and that is deliberate. A name and a string of letters at the top of a medical article is a claim you have no way of checking, and it is the easiest part of a page to fake. What you can check is the evidence. So instead of asking you to trust a signature, every article publishes the sources it was built from and invites you to read them. Judge the article on those.

What these articles are built from

Each article ends with a list of named sources — typically five, never fewer than 3. They are named in full rather than hidden behind a generic “medically reviewed” badge, so you can see precisely what a statement rests on and weigh it yourself. In practice those sources fall into four groups:

• Specialty society guidance. Evidence-based clinical guidelines from the North American Spine Society (NASS), patient material from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS OrthoInfo), and subject-specific guidance such as the AOSpine recommendations on degenerative cervical myelopathy or the NCCN guidance covering spinal metastatic disease.
• Point-of-care clinical references. UpToDate and StatPearls — the same summaries clinicians consult while working, kept current by their own editorial teams.
• Peer-reviewed primary literature. Trials and cohort studies where they materially change what a patient should expect, cited by author and journal so they can be looked up.
• Standard reference texts. The textbooks spine surgeons are trained on, used for anatomy, technique and surgical decision-making.

Society guidance is cited wherever it exists for the topic. Plenty of narrower subjects have no guideline at all, and those articles lean on the clinical references, the primary literature and the standard texts instead — we do not dress up a textbook chapter as a guideline to make a page look more official than it is. Where the clearest available description of a specific implant is the manufacturer’s own patient material, it is cited by name as exactly that, so you can discount it accordingly.

What “Last updated” means

The date on an article is a review date, not a publish date and not a file-modification timestamp. It means the whole article — the explanation, the symptom list, the warning signs, the questions and answers, and the source list — was read end to end on that date and either confirmed as still accurate or changed. Fixing a typo or adjusting the layout does not move it.

Articles are reviewed on a rolling cycle of at least once a year, and out of cycle whenever a specialty society revises a relevant guideline or a well-conducted trial changes what patients should expect. Where a review changes clinical meaning, the article is edited and the date moves. Because reviews run in batches rather than all at once, articles carry different dates; each one tells you when that particular article was last checked. The most recent review pass landed in July 2026.

Where this library stops

This article is general education, not medical advice. It cannot account for your history, imaging, or examination — talk to a qualified clinician about your own care.

That limit is real, not legal boilerplate. These articles describe the typical case: the usual pattern of symptoms, the treatments usually tried first, the recovery most people report. You are an individual, and the details that decide your care — your examination, your imaging, your other conditions, what you have already tried, and what matters to you — are exactly the details a web page cannot see.

Two consequences worth being blunt about. Recovery figures and outcome ranges describe groups of patients in published series; they are not a forecast for you, and no article here should be read as a recommendation to have or avoid a particular operation. And the warning-sign lists exist to send you to be assessed urgently, never to reassure you at home — an absence of listed warning signs rules nothing out. If something is getting rapidly worse, get seen.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or leaves out something that would have changed how you understood your own situation, we want to know. Tell us through the contact page, and where you can, include the page address, the sentence in question and any source you are working from — it lets us check it far faster.

Reports are read by a clinician. Substantive corrections are made to the article and its review date is moved to reflect the change. A published medical library that is never corrected is not a careful one; it is one that is not listening.