There are many reports that individuals who have low-back/buttock and/or shoulder/neck pain and if they have surgery, and especially if they have many surgeries, both of which indicates that whatever was causing the pain is more severe than an invidual who had such pain and it got spontaneously better.
I have learned that neurological pain for which spinal surgery is given is usually caused by a disease, an autoimmune inflammatory disease. Usually 80 mg. Triamcinolone, a steroidal anti-inflammatory, given in the buttock intramuscularly will decrease the above pain, proving it is inflammatory in nature. Most people get better on their own without surgery. Those who have surgery often get better, over a long period, but many people get better over a long period anyway. So, the surgery usually means nothing.
I learned that those with severe neurological pain often had other diseases of an autoimmune nature and then learned that many researchers at Mayo Clinic and Cornell had determined that many painful neuropathies are autoimmune in nature. A better word is autoimmune and infalmmatory in nature.
If nerves are abnormal deep in the buttock, and cause back pain or deep in the shoulder and cause neck pain, it seems logical that nerves all over the body are awry. If they are the nerves that control the heart, and if they are abnormal, it could cause a cardiac arrhythmia: that is why more people die who have multiple surgeries, because those are the subset of patients that have more severe autoimmune disease!
Pain medicine is "blamed" on peoples deaths, but the blood levels are from the very low to the very high. There is no consistency. The idea that opiates will cause respiraory depression is: Bunk! in most cases: opiophobia.
Michael Jackson had vitilago: severe vitilago. He had rosacea: there are pictures of him on the internet. He used make-up to cover both of them up. Both, vitilago and rosacea are autoimmune in nature. Michael Jackson probably took pain medicines from due to chronic neurological pain and it was probably caused by an autoimmune disease, the same disease that caused his rosacea and vitilago. He died from the disease not from drugs. You know, most coroners do not know much medicine, that is why they do what they do. I am finishing a book about the information above, 500 pages, it will be out this fall: Rheumatism, Enigma Unraveled will be the title.
I think about 3% of people who have neurological pain have herniated discs etc. The rest make money for the docs involved. They are surgeons, not necessarily physicians. Those patients will have single dermatome neuropathy: only on a neurological examination. Surprisingly, spinal MRI's do not have the resolution to "see" nerve roots analytically. The MRI's just see the arthritis and the surgeons are attracted to it and the bucks they make for doing surgery. Not a bad racket. They used to bleed people for thousands of years for the wrong reasons too. Not too surprisingly the spinal arthritis is caused by rheumatoid disease and that is an autoimmune disease that has as one of its findings, frequently, neuropathy: Yup, that is it. Simple, rheumatic neuropathy is what most people have not herniated discs or osteophyte impingement and that is why most spinal surgery fails.
You know why there are so many internet adds for spinal surgery: because it is a multi-billion dollar market in todays, medical business climate.