INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Back pain is one of the most common medical problems worldwide.

The pain can be debilitating, and more than one in four people in the U.S. suffer from it.

Medication, therapies and surgeries can offer relief. And now for the first-time, new technology is helping to make fusion surgery more personalized.

Whether it’s cooking up chicken in her kitchen or digging up dirt in her front yard, nothing stops Mary Hall, except her back pain.

“I could not turn my head at all. And it was excruciating pain,” said Hall.

Mary needed a spinal fusion, and she became the first person in the U.S. to try a new, targeted procedure.

“We’re talking about preoperative 3D printed guides that are patient specific,” said Dr. Oliver Tannous, orthopedic spine surgeon at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.

Tannous was the first in the country to perform the MySpine Cervical 3D printed fusion.

“This is what a 3D printed guide looks like,” said Tannous. “And the beauty of that is that in the operating room you have a 3D mold of the patient’s spine, and you have a guide that latches onto the spine that allows you to drill the screw directories is in a very accurate manner.”

Traditionally, surgeons would place screws and rods by what they thought was the best spot.

“You have the spinal cord on one side, you have the nerve above or below, and then you have the vertebral artery, which is the artery that feeds the brain on the other side of that screw. So that accuracy becomes important,” said Tannous.

MySpine reduces operating times by up to 50%, there’s less blood loss, and recovery time is faster.

For Hall, in less than two weeks she was back at it!

“I started doing a little bit this and a little bit of that, and all of a sudden I’m doing everything and I’m happy as I can be,” said Hall.

The 3D MySpine technology has been a game changer in the spine.

Not just the cervical spine but in the thoracic and the lumbar spine as well.

This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.