Clinically, after minimally invasive or open surgery for lumbar disc herniation, patients will feel that the pain in their legs immediately reduces or even disappears, but a few patients feel that the numbness is still there and seems to be worse than before surgery, and they are very anxious. In fact, this is a normal phenomenon after surgery, and I will give you the specific reasons. We all know that pain and numbness are both conducted by sensory nerves, but the conduction of pain is a small unmyelinated fibers, the conduction of numbness is thick myelinated fibers, unmyelinated fibers structure is relatively simple, the recovery after surgical decompression is faster, while myelinated fibers need to undergo a longer, more complex repair process, so the pain is reduced more quickly, numbness takes longer to recover. In addition, pain is a more acute and unpleasant emotional experience compared to numbness, so preoperative numbness is often masked by pain, while postoperative pain is reduced and disappeared, and numbness comes to the fore as the main conflict. First of all, it is clear that the vast majority of numbness symptoms can be recovered, and the recovery time is usually within 3 months. Of course, each patient’s situation is different, some people have a shorter time, some people need half a year or more, which is often positively correlated with the length of the disease, the degree of compression and other factors, and there are even individual patients with numbness will always exist, which is due to preoperative nerve compression led to irreversible damage, postoperative decompression of the nerve can not be fully restored.