Important Announcements To Legacy Spine and Neurological Specialist’s Patients

While 2020 and 2021 have been very challenging and unprecedented years, we do have some very good news to brighten the day of all our Legacy team and patients!

Kelli Schlesinger MD and I are excited to announce that Dominic Maggio MD Neurological Surgeon will be joining our Legacy practice in July.  Dr. Maggio joins us from his complex spine fellowship at Ohio State University and his neurosurgery residency at University of Virginia, Charlottesville.  He comes with tremendous training and experience  from two of the best neurosurgery  training programs in the country.  He is a very talented neurosurgeon with expertise in minimally invasive and complex spinal surgery.  He will be moving to Little Rock with his lovely family with 3 young children.

We will continue to offer telehealth services for the foreseeable future to facilitate your treatment plan, particularly those of you who live long distances away. We are excited about some new MIS technology and innovation‘s coming our way this year and in continuing to use our outpatient minimally invasive SLIF surgery (Screwless Lumbar Interbody Fusion) when a fusion surgery is needed on the lower back through a key hole incision.   For the last four years we have worked with some innovative spinal companies and imaging technology companies to develop the most minimally invasive lumbar fusion surgery option that is available anywhere in the world!

Additional developments:

In May, Dr. Flaxman and Dr. Magnuson, anesthesia pain management doctors of Southern Regional Anesthesia Consultants (SRAC), will be joining our team in performing injection procedures at the Legacy Surgery Center.  They also offer medical pain management services at their office for patients needing medication management.

Dr. Carlos Roman, an anesthesia pain provider of Proper Pain Solutions (PPS) will no longer be performing procedures at Legacy Surgery Center.   However, his pain management partner Dr. Eugene Becker will be performing injection procedures on patients we have clinically shared with PPS at Legacy Surgery Center.

Notice:     PPS Drs. Roman and Becker perform pain procedures at other facilities in the state.  Their Little Rock office is adjacent to our surgery center.  Due to these factors accidents can happen with where you are scheduled for future spinal injection procedures.  We want you to be aware of this possibility and if it happens we urge you to remind their scheduler of your desire for your procedures to be carried out exclusively at Legacy Surgery Center if you desire our continued concomitant care and back up in case of any need for urgent surgical care.

Why?  In the best interest of your spinal care it is our medical policy that all the patients we are caring for undergo all needed spinal procedures at Legacy Surgery Center.

Why?    All spine procedures carry a small but definite risk of complications including spinal bleeding that could possibly need emergency neurosurgery operative intervention.    If spinal procedures are done elsewhere and there is an unforeseen complication needing urgent surgery, there will be a significant delay in our ability to intervene.    This could possibly lead to irreversible paralysis that might have otherwise been avoided if not for the delay.   Also, and very importantly, when spinal procedures are performed elsewhere, we have limited ability to participate in your spinal management plan, have difficultly accessing the images from the procedures and the records of such as compared to the ease of such when done here at Legacy Surgery Center.   We believe in staying directly involved in all aspects of your spinal care to ensure the best possible quality of all of your treatment plan.  As neurological specialists we are trained in attention to detail.  We cannot achieve these goals when procedures are done on your spine elsewhere.

Therefore if you are a patient that has seen either PPS doctor at any of their clinic sites in Little Rock, Morrilton and Russellville and you are inadvertently offered or scheduled for spine procedures at one of the other outpatient surgical facilities where they work, you can and should insist that your spine procedures be performed at Legacy Surgery Center by Dr. Becker or by Legacy physicians if it is your desire that our Legacy Neurological physicians remain the “Captain” of your Spine-care-ship and be readily available for any possible emergency surgical care.

Why?   There is far more to your spine care than the actual injection of a medication with a needle into your spine.     Most pain management doctors are anesthesiologists or physical medicine rehabilitation doctors who not trained in neuro-imaging, neuro-anatomy, neuro-pathology and neuro-physiology like our Neurosurgeon and Neurologist specialists are.  PPS pain management doctors Becker and Roman are excellent at anesthesia pain management.    But they are not only not trained as surgeons of the spine, they are not surgeons of any kind.  Surgery is a field of expertise that takes 7 years of post medical school training and cannot be learned as a weekend course.   I strongly advise you to always confirm that whoever is proposing to do any form of open surgery that involves an incision and putting anything in your body other than a needle on any part of your body is in fact a trained board certified or board eligible surgeon in that field.  Nothing could be more important than confirming this for any form of spine surgery offered to you as there are pain management doctors that are performing open surgical procedures on the spine including placing spinal implants in patients after merely taking a course.  This is not the kind of training you want for your spine surgery needs!  

We strongly feel that all patient’s spine care diagnosis and plan should be created and managed by a neurological spine specialist or by spinal orthopedic surgeons regardless of who does an actual injection procedure.  We also strongly feel that whoever is your spinal surgeon should be on staff at the site where any spinal injection procedures are being performed on you regardless of who does the actual injection procedure for the reasons above – in case of a surgical emergency complication and for access to the information, records, and images for continuity of your care. 

We stay actively involved in your care all along the way with adjustments whenever necessary based on your response to various interventions starting with the least invasive plan first even if you do not initially need surgery or ever need surgery.   We are also well prepared and experienced with minimally invasive surgical options should such be necessary.

We are happy to continue to manage of your spine care if you continue to see either doctor of PPS for medication management as long as you insist that any of your spine procedures are done at our location by Dr. Becker or us for all the reasons above.  There will be no interruption of your care with these changes and apologize for any confusion this may cause.

If you instead desire to transfer your overall spine care management to PPS, we can be available at any point in the future to resume your care surgical or non surgical in the future.