Treating Spinal Stenosis Without Surgery
Are You a Regenexx Candidate?Each spinal vertebra (spinal bone) has a hole in the middle — the spinal canal — through which the nerves and spinal cord run. When structures inside or outside the spinal canal put pressure on these nerves, it’s called spinal stenosis.
Because the nerves that run through the spine are pain-sensitive and connect to your legs, you can get lower back pain as well as weakness or numbness in your legs or feet. People with spinal stenosis tend to suffer from standing intolerance, and standing for any length of time can cause back pain or leg symptoms that immediately improve once they sit down.
How Is Spinal Stenosis Commonly Treated?
Common more conservative treatments include physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medications, and high-dose epidural steroid injections to help reduce swelling around the nerves. However, although steroid injections temporarily help the pain, they can have severe side effects and reduce your body’s ability to heal.
If all of the above fails, spinal stenosis is treated with surgery to decompress the area, which often means removing bone, disc, and ligaments around the tight spot in the spinal canal. Other times, spinal fusion surgery is performed (hardware is inserted to bolt the spinal bones together), but this can lead to adjacent segment disease (ASD), where areas above and below the fusion can get damaged over time.
Additionally, spinal surgery comes with significant downtime.
That’s why we’ve developed a different approach.
How to Treat Spinal Stenosis Without Surgery?
During Regenexx’s outpatient procedures, custom concentrations of your body’s natural healing agents are injected into the exact areas of damage in the spine. Treatments use only your own blood to make super-concentrated platelet-rich plasma (PRP) or your own bone marrow concentrate (BMC), which contains stem cells.
Spinal stenosis treatment may include Regenexx-DDD protocol, which is the world’s first alternative to stenosis surgery that allows you to maintain your normal anatomy. Best of all, your downtime will be a fraction of what it is with surgery and generally requires little or no opioid pain medications or time off of work.
Am I a candidate?Webinar: Treating Back Pain Without Surgery
Join Chris Centeno, MD, founder of Regenexx, to learn how Regenexx procedures can help treat your back pain without surgery and lead to a faster recovery.
During this free webinar you’ll learn:
- How procedures using bone marrow concentrate (BMC) and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) compare to surgery and other spine pain treatment options
- Procedure expectations
- Answers to the most common questions about regenerative medicine treatments
Is Regenexx Right For Your Spinal Stenosis?
At Regenexx, we want the best outcomes for everyone. So we’ve developed a process to determine if our treatments may be right for you.
During your initial appointment, your Regenexx doctor will use our four-part SANS (stability, articulation, neuromuscular, and symmetry) evaluation to identify the underlying causes of your pain. Your doctor will examine your injury through a full range of motion and may use ultrasound to observe the inner workings in real time.
This is important, as research shows that an MRI indicating stenosis isn’t enough to appropriately diagnose stenosis as the cause of back pain.
Am I a candidate?Watch a real Regenexx spinal procedure performed by a certified Regenexx physician:
Our goal is to use the least invasive, least expensive procedure to get the desired results. Your Regenexx physician will work with you to determine whether that would be a platelet procedure or a BMC procedure.
Get started to see if you are a Regenexx candidate
To talk one-on-one with one of our team members about how Regenexx may be able to help your orthopedic pain or injury, please complete the form below and we will be in touch with you within the next business day.
