Picture your spine like a stack of jelly donuts.
The vertebrae are the donuts. The discs are the filling.
Healthy discs are plump, full of fluid, keeping your vertebrae separated and your nerves happy.
Fusion permanently locks two or more of those donuts together. The hardware stabilizes things — and for the structural problem, it works.
But here's what your surgeon doesn't discuss at your follow-up:
Your remaining discs are now under more mechanical stress than before. They're compensating for the segments that no longer move.
And they're doing it in a body that is no longer efficiently delivering the one mineral those discs require to hold their hydration.
Your discs are built around molecules called proteoglycans. Their entire job is to pull water into the disc and keep it functional. But proteoglycans are magnesium-dependent. Without it —
The disc dries out. Flattens. Loses height.
And the nerve sitting next to it gets compressed like a garden hose pinched under a truck tire.
This is also why nerve pain doesn't resolve after fusion. Your nerves need magnesium to regulate pain signals. Without it they stay hypersensitive — firing constantly — even when the structural compression has technically been addressed.
Your muscles need it too. Magnesium is what allows muscles to actually relax. Without it they seize and cramp — which is why so many fusion patients have worse muscle pain after surgery than before.
The medical industry knows all of this.
But there's no billing code for correcting a nutritional deficiency. You can't schedule a surgical suite for it. You can't charge $2,000 for it.
So instead they run the same play, over and over:
More pain meds when the first ones stop working → more injections when the meds aren't enough → another surgery when the adjacent segment gives out → repeat until you're out of options or out of money
It's not always malicious.
It's just a system that profits from your deficiency staying exactly where it is.