Besides insurance companies would seeing it as a risk, the surgeon's malpractice insurance legal team might also see it as too risky, but given that VBD + SC was used off-label for years in breast cancer until SC was finally approved last year, maybe not such a huge risk in the case of LS, which doesn't have the anaphylactic shock risks that SC does, and surgeons used it routinely.
Might require some sort of legal waiver to use LS for currently non-approved uses? IIRC, when I had a cervical disk replacement back in 2005, I had to sign a whole mess of forms/waivers, partly for the surgery/anesthesia risks on their own, partly because the semi-flexible replacement disk was only FDA approved for thoracic use at the time - but it had been used for cervical disk replacements in Europe for over 13 years, and my neurosurgeon had done over 100 surgeries with it here in the states.
He gave me a bunch of literature to read so I understood the risks, I was all for it after doing more DD - two of my coworkers, also golfers, had had traditional cervical disk fusions, and they were never the same afterward - never regained full range of motion, and the one guy who had bone taken from his hip for the fusion had more post-surgery complications from the hip than his neck! After considering all of that stuff, to me it was a no-brainer to go ahead with the artificial disk, and except for some post-surgery bone spurs that were taken care of via medicine I've had zero issues that were directly related to the disk itself - the scar tissue in my neck was a different matter though, but that would have been a problem regardless of which choice I had made.
