Mr Farhaan Altaf is a Consultant Spinal Surgeon in Hitchin, Hertfordshire who specialises in the treatment of lower back conditions. His NHS base is at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore, London. His clinical interests are in adult degenerative spinal surgery and spinal deformity. He specialises in the treatment of lower back conditions such as back pain, spinal stenosis, disc prolapse, infection, trauma, scoliosis, and spondylolisthesis. He also sees patients for neck conditions such as cervical stenosis, myelopathy and radiculopathy.

Mr Altaf qualified from St. Bartholomew’s and the Royal London Hospital Medical School in 2002. He received the Jackson Burrows and Moreton Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement as a medical student. He trained on the North West Thames London rotation and achieved his completion of training in 2015. Before taking up a consultant post at the RNOH, he undertook further subspecialist fellowships: one-year Spinal Fellowship at the Vancouver General Hospital in Canada and a one-year Spinal Fellowship at the Royal Northshore Hospital in Sydney, Australia. He also worked as a fellow for three months in Lyon, France.

Mr Altaf has published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and presented at numerous national and international meetings.

What are the common symptoms that your patients tend to present with?

Most often they present with symptoms of either lower back pain or leg pain symptoms. Neck pain and pain down one arm or both arms is also common as well, which can be associated with pins and needles. Sometimes they present with other symptoms such as difficulty with walking or difficulty with sleeping associated with pain.

What are the treatments that you're able to offer your patience?

The most important thing is a comprehensive initial assessment, followed by appropriate diagnosis using up-to-date imaging to come up with a diagnosis.

Once a diagnosis is made, there is a range of treatments that are available, starting from more urgent treatments, which is rarer, to more common treatments which are elective.

This can range from physiotherapy to other more comprehensive non-operative treatment measures and other interventional procedures such as injections into the spine, such as epidural injections or facet joint injections or nerve root block injections, and then moving on to more surgical procedures which can range depending on where the pathology is, what type of pathology from either a discectomy and fusion operations, which can range from either open or minimally invasive techniques.

What are your subspecialist interests?

My practice primarily involves looking at the degenerative spine. It involves looking at lower back, deformity of the spine and also looking at the neck.

Again, pathology there can vary from either disc bulges to back pain associated with degenerative changes. A range of treatments can be offered based on what kind of pathology there actually is. My specialist interest is mainly adult degenerative complaints, but I also deal with deformities.