During a spinal surgery, does the surgeon typically look at adjacent levels or solely do what they set out to do? would they fix other problems?

No extra: I do not typically expose other levels. I just work where the main problem is. Exploring other levels unnecessarily increases the length of surgery and potential complications.

Depends: In general, particularly in minimally invasive spinal surgeries, we go right for the area of pathology and fix that problem without putting the patient through extra soft tissue dissection and morbidity to "explore" other areas. That being said, sometimes we will see unexpected findings in areas near where we are working that we will then often go on to fix.