Best Health And Wellness Info

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Many people who visit doctors with the complaints of numbness, tingling, and sometimes weakness in one or both legs with or without low back pain are told that their symptoms are due to lumbar spinal stenosis, but oftentimes doctors don’t really explain what that means.  At it’s most basic, spinal stenosis simply means that the tunnel that runs down the spine that the spinal cord goes through is narrower than normal at one or more points along the way.  Although it is often used a a diagosis or an explanation of a person’s symptoms by many doctors, it doesn’t really tell you that much.

In fact, there’s more than one kind of spinal stenosis, and the treatment options and potential success of those treatment options varies greatly depending on the cause and severity of the stenosis. 

First we must differentiate between congenital and acquired stenosis.  Congenital means that you were born with a narrower spinal canal than most people.  In my experience, congenital stenosis by itself rarely creates problems (as you might expect, the body adapts to things it’s born with).  But if congenital stenosis is combined with any type of acquired stenosis, then it tends to make the situation more severe and more difficult to treat.

The term “acquired stenosis” means that the narrowing of the spinal canal is something that developed at some point over the course of your life.  The term “acquired” in this context has always seemed strange to me because I tend to associate the word “acquired” with things someone has intentionally come into possession of by means of either great effort, great expense, or great risk.  I visualize a stuffy guy in a tuxedo bragging to his friends, “I have managed to acquire an original Rembrandt painting, several bottles of Dom Perignon, and an incredible case of spinal stenosis!”  But I digress…

 Acquired spinal stenosis is from one or a combination of a few causes.  These include disc bulges/herniations, bone growth related to spinal joint degeneration, and space occupying lesions (tumors, cysts, scar tissue, etc.).  Depending on the cause(s) and severity of the stenosis, there are different potential treatments. 

For stenosis related to disc herniations, treatments such as physical therapy (rehabilitative exercise), chiropractic, spinal decompression therapy, and various surgical interventions are all potential treatment options.  In addition, anti-inflammatory drugs and natural anti-inflammatories may be helpful in reducing pressure on the spinal cord by decreasing swelling.  Decreased swelling can also be achieved through the use of epidural steroid injections (usually with the drug cortisone). 

With stenosis related to excess bone growth due to spinal joint degeneration, there are still a number of treatment options, but the results of treatment tend to be less positive overall.  Conservative measures such as exercise and chiropractic are effective for some people.  Others get temporary relief from anti-inflammatories and/or steroid injections. For some though, surgery may be necessary to get any significantly lasting improvement.  Again, depending on severity, different surgical approaches may be used.  Some patients get good effects from “minimally invasive” surgeries done by trimming away excess bone using microsurgical tools inserted through small incisions and guided by an inserted viewscope.  More severe cases may require more aggressive surgeries.  In some cases, the condition is too advanced and/or the patient is too frail for surgery to be attempted, and so those patients can only be kept as comfortable as possible with temporary symptomatic treatments.

Finally, a small number of spinal stenosis cases are caused by space occupying lesions.  Spinal tumors, both benign and malignant can grow into the spinal canal and compress the spinal cord.  In most cases, these are best treated with surgical removal.  Likewise, spinal cysts are usually surgically removed or drained.  In the case of scar tissue, the most common source of scar tissue in the spinal canal is past spinal surgery.  Because cutting out scar tissue typically results in even more scar tissue development in the future, surgical treatment tends to be avoided if at all possible.  For those with scar tissue, stretching exercises and surface scar treatment with massage and perhaps natural or pharmaceutical scar softening agents may be used to try to improve the flexibility of the scar and to reduce it’s compressive effects in the spinal canal.

Although spinal stenosis can be debilitating and can be difficult to alleviate 100%, most people with spinal stenosis can be helped considerably with conservative (non-surgical) treatments.  Before considering surgery, I recommend at least getting an opinion from a chiropractor and/or physical therapist as to non-surgical treatment options.

 Stay tuned to my natural remedies blog for more information about spinal stenosis and herniated disc treatment.

Share This