Scar tissue forms around the neural elementsJointPain Hack Review and causes pain. If the scar tissue is removed with further surgery, guess what happens? Yes, more scar tissue will return, as the human body is very good at making it.
A spinal fusion was done with appropriately placed screws and rods along with bone fusion biological material, except the human body decided not to respond appropriately with a fusion. When this happens, the hardware continues to absorb stresses and loads, and eventually can break with the patient experiencing increased pain. Sometimes this may be fixed with more surgery, sometimes not.
When a neural element is freed up during surgery, or decompressed as it's called, typically it responds appropriately by healing along with pain going away. However, there are times when the neural element has been compressed for so long that it decides not to respond with healing. The pain may persist, and the answer when this happens is not further decompressive surgery unless there's still compression of a neural element.
The surgery performed only addressed part of the problem. An example would be if an adult patient has significant pain from a large degenerative scoliosis spanning 12 spinal levels. Rather than addressing all of the levels, the patient decides to only have 3 levels addressed. This decision will decrease the risk for the patient, but at the same time increase the risk that continued pain will be the end result. Rather than achieving 80% pain relief, maybe only 50% is achieved.