Patient s perspective: Your mother is obese and possibly has got a huge stomach. If your mother wants a non surgegical way, she must lose weight by 20kgs at least. If she is not diabetic now, she will be very soon. It may not be necessary that the herniated disc at L4/5 which is due to overweight probably may not be the only cause of the pain. It also appears that at that weight she is lazy or unable to do exercise. Buy her a crazy Fix vibratory machine. This exercise equipment will require her to only stand on it for 10 minutes and will help lose weight. Her stomach must go in first as it carries too much baggage. Also get her several sessions of full body massage which should last about 1 1/2 hour per treatment. Reduce her portion of food if she likes her food too much. Drop down quantity, but tell her she can still eat again a light meal 3 hours later. This will still feed her same amount of food, but will start shrinking her stomach size. After a months she will find that she does not get hungry in between and will develop a habit of taking out less food. Together with these 3 combination of treatment, she may find the back pain is completely gone! And if she goes under surgery, there is no guarantee that the bulge is the only thing that is giving the pain. She may end up getting worse.