I often meet patients who need surgical treatment and ask me: Doctor, is it minimally invasive surgery? Why can’t we do minimally invasive surgery? In the eyes of many people, minimally invasive is synonymous with advanced technology and traditional surgery is a backward treatment method. Is this really true? Minimally invasive surgery, in a broad sense, is surgery with tiny trauma, and in a narrow sense, it refers to surgery performed with modern medical devices and related equipment such as laparoscopy and thoracoscopy. It is generally believed that minimally invasive has the characteristics of small incision, less trauma, faster recovery and less pain compared to traditional surgery. However, as an emerging surgical technique, the safety of surgery is questioned due to its small surgical field of view (it is sometimes difficult to grasp for complete removal of the lesion) and narrow working channel. In addition, the technical requirements of the surgery itself for the surgeon and some defects of minimally invasive equipment, its scope of application still has some limitations; while traditional surgery, after years of clinical practice and application, has a set of systematic and complete procedures, and has also fully proved the reliability of its efficacy. Furthermore, each treatment method has its own strengths and weaknesses, and only by choosing the appropriate method according to the specific pathological characteristics of each patient can we achieve the effect of improving the strengths and avoiding the weaknesses. If minimally invasive surgery is adopted blindly without regard to the characteristics of the disease, it may bring about greater internal trauma and safety risks. A recent Meta-analysis conducted by an Australian academic evaluating past research papers showed that minimally invasive surgery for lumbar disc herniation did not differ from conventional surgery in terms of clinical outcomes and perioperative costs. Therefore, it was concluded that minimally invasive surgery for lumbar herniation is not superior to conventional surgery.