MIDDLEBURG HEIGHTS, Ohio — Everyone knows someone with back pain. For some, it gets so bad that surgery becomes the only option for relief.
“It was ruining my life,” said 29-year-old Lakewood resident Theresa Tuma.
She tried steroids and physical therapy after being diagnosed with a herniated disc.
“The disc has a fibrous annulus which is the ring around the disc, and then there’s soft squishy stuff inside, you can kind of think of it as slime,” said Section Chief of Neurosurgery for Southwest General and Associate Program Director of Neurosurgery at University Hospitals, Dr. Xiaofei Zhou.
“When there is a rupture in the outer portion of the disc, this little bit of soft interior disc can come out and it’s this extruded part that is usually causing pressure on a nerve and so I can’t really fix that, your disc has ruptured, but I can take out the herniated portion of that disc, the extruded portion…the goal is just to get pressure off those nerves.”
Zhou is the first surgeon in northeast Ohio to use Arthrex endoscopic technology to treat the issue. Her first surgery was in January 2025, and in February 2025, Zhou performed the procedure on Tuma at the UH Neurological Institute at Southwest General Health Center in Middleburg Heights.
“What is really cool about this procedure, though is how we access the nerves and it’s through a very small camera port and I can do all of my work through the back of the camera and take out the disc from an incision about the size of a thumbnail,” said Zhou.
“There’s no need for drilling bone, there’s really no need for taking off muscle, it's just a little camera port so patients kind of recover a whole lot better than they did with traditional surgery.”
Tuma was able to walk the same day. She called post-surgery ‘amazing.’
“It was something that I hadn’t experienced in almost a year because I had this for eleven months,” she said. “I had no pain and I thought I’d wake up with, you know, some soreness, some stiffness, anything, I really didn’t feel any of that.”
Zhou said surgery isn’t for every patient.
“We cannot promise you a perfect surgery, there’s always risk involved, so if we can do anything to avoid surgery in the first place that’s what we do.”
