Make sure you do quite a bit of due diligence before letting anyone cut on your spine. This podcast scared the hell out of me:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-death/id1421573955
According to Wikipedia: 33 incidents of gross neurosurgical malpractice while working at hospitals in the DallasβFort Worth metroplex, which maimed 31 patients and caused 2 deaths. He was accused of injuring 33 out of 38 patients in less than two years β a track record so unlikely that hospital administrators and district attorneys simply felt that it was too unbelievable to be true, allowing Duntsch to continue to practice before his license was revoked by the Texas Medical Board, and to avoid prosecution for years. In 2017, Duntsch was convicted of maiming one of his patients and sentenced to life imprisonment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch
TLDR: Grossly unqualified spinal surgeon in Dallas butchered his patients because he quite literally had no idea what he was doing. Dallas hospitals allowed him to hop from hospital to hospital with no warning, and the Texas Medical Board did not act in anything like a timely manner to keep people from being maimed. In other words, there's nothing other than word of mouth by which patients can tell if their doc is competent.