My first article of 2026 I understood back pain professionally long before I understood it personally. For more than 25 years, I listened to patients describe pain that disrupted their sleep, their work, their relationships, and their sense of self. I treated it with medications, braces, physical therapy, chiropractic care, injections, and — when imaging supported it — surgery. But in the final weeks of 2025, I experienced persistent back pain myself. Not dramatic. Not disabling. But...

Why Waiting and Repeating Spine Surgeries Accelerates Disc Failure—and How a Motion-Preserving Disc Replacement Could Change the Path Forward Dr. Kingsley R. Chin MD, MBA Professor, Orthopedic Spine Surgery | CEO KIC Ventures E very year, millions of patients suffering from chronic low back pain follow the same exhausting path: conservative care, injections, surgery—and when the pain returns, another surgery. Often these procedures are performed at the same spinal level, removing more disc...

The real story in spine today is not who’s entering, but who’s exiting—with companies like NuVasive, Stryker, and Zimmer stepping back as structural risks mount. Zero-sum surgeon adoption battles, heavy instrumentation costs, and the shift toward motion preservation, ASCs, and IPM-driven procedures are eroding the old hardware-based model. The future belongs to physician-led innovators aligned with these shifts, not legacy fusion portfolios.