Have you been suffering with chronic low back pain and leg pain along with numbness and pins and needles or tingling in one or both of your feet? If so, it is possible that spinal stenosis is a condition that you might be having.
By the time patients with spinal stenosis are referred to the pain service, it has been at least 5 to 6 years and often we do wish that they had come earlier so we would have been able to give those patients a better set of strategies to help manage the pain.
Surgery is very rarely needed for this condition but there are a lot of other things that can be done with the help of a pain consultant. The pain consultant and the multidisciplinary team that they work with becomes important in understanding what your treatment options are.
In these times you have a number of other treatment strategies that can be put forward in a holistic manner and that can be personalized to your care in order to get the outcome that you want.
What are the treatment options then for spinal stenosis?
It’s important for us to understand what the causes are because spinal stenosis refers to a narrowing of the area for your nerves in the middle of your back or in your spine. This narrowing can happen in the neck so you may have symptoms going into your arms or this narrowing can happen in your lower back then you would have symptoms going in your legs.
The narrowing can be because of disc related problems or joint arthritis related problems and each of them presents with corresponding muscle spasm and therefore treatments can be injection based or slightly stronger nerve pain tablets.
Strategies can be personalized to you.