Dr.
Robin
Srour

I have seen hundreds of patients in consultation, exhausted after years without answers: scans described as “normal,” ineffective treatments, and sometimes the devastating message that they would simply have to live with the pain. Yet in a significant proportion of chronic low back pain, the pain comes precisely from these joints that were not being investigated.

It is for these patients that I devoted part of my career to facet syndrome: first to learn how to diagnose it rigorously, then to design a facet arthrodesis device, patented in 2017, that treats the source of the pain through a less invasive procedure than conventional pedicle-screw fixation.

One man changed the way I saw them: Professor Daniel Maitrot, my former head of department. After his university career, he chose to return to surgery in Colmar to continue what had become his mission: relieving patients with these cysts, who were too often sent from one consultation to another without answers.

One day, over coffee, he asked me to make him a promise. When a mentor asks, you say yes without hesitation. He then told me: “You will take care of my Tarlov cysts.” Not his own — those of his patients. A few days later, illness took him from us.

I have kept that promise ever since. I developed an original surgical technique designed to be as minimally invasive as possible, and have operated on one of the largest patient series in Europe. Tarlov disease will not be orphaned a second time.