How to get DBS/STN surgery

[Bruce]

I just sent this info to two people, and since it took me about a year to find accurate info, and was misinformed a few times, I thought what I learned was valuable info.

To give you an idea what type of PD patient is elgible, here is a few important criteria. A recent diagnosed patient, a bleeder, a pwp with severe memory loss and people in the later stages of PD are not elgible for the surgery. The ideal patient is someone who still responds to Sinemetand is at the stage where the PD drugs are wearing off and can no longer increase the Sinemet dose, because of increased side effects such as dyskinesia.

First I went to the Medtronics website and brought up the list of neurologists that had experience with the Medtronics device. I thought if a neuro was on this list, it would be likely they would have experience with the DBS surgery.

I found a neurologist in Indianapolis that was only a one hour drive to his office and he did have experienxe with programing the device on patients that have had the STN surgery.

Then the neuro gave me the name and address of a neurosurgeon that had being performing the surgery.The neuro also gave me the option of choosing any hospital in the city.

To determine if medicare in your state covers the surgery, call the number of the medicare carrier for your state, give them the following billing code numbers: 332.0, 61885, and 61862. The medicare doesn't know anything about DBS surgery, but when he/she looks up the numbers, you will get an accurate answer to your question. I found the current rule that says medicare coverage for each state is left up to the discretion of the medicare carrier if they want to pay for most of the surgery. The carrier is the insurance company that handles all of the biling for each state. I was misinformed more then once about whether medicare will pay for it.

So I am confident this is accurate information and, believe me, it wasn't easy to find this info.

The neuro confirmed what I had already learned and that is an average of 60-70 % improvement in all symptoms.