You used to walk tall and without pain wherever you went, but these days, not so much, thanks to lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS), which affects about 11% of older adults in the United States.
Now, you need to walk slowly and hunched over, if you even walk at all anymore, and you’re tired of being held prisoner by the common low back issue.
Many of our patients have found great success and freedom of movement through the cutting-edge MILD® procedure, which we offer here at Johnston Pain Management.
Our team of experienced spine health specialists understands the limitations of back pain and why people would rather not pile onto the problem with surgery. Well, the MILD procedure is answering the call and providing a minimally invasive, highly effective road back to pain-free movement. Let’s take a look.
The term stenosis stands for narrowing, which is what is happening in the spinal canal in your lower back. With spinal stenosis, degenerative changes in your spine, such as thickened ligaments, start to crowd your spinal canal and press up against sensitive nerves and nerve roots that travel through this important passageway.
As a result, you can experience symptoms that often include:
These symptoms tend to travel along the length of the nerve, so if there’s nerve compression in your lower back due to LSS, symptoms can travel down into your buttocks and legs.
One of the hallmarks of LSS is pain in your back when you’re standing up straight and moving. This symptom can often be relieved by hunching forward, which reduces pressure on your spinal canal in your lower back.
But spending your days not moving and hunched over is no way to live, which is where our MILD procedure can help.
Many of our patients, quite understandably, don’t find the idea of back surgery all that appealing. The risks and disruption alone are considerable.
That’s why we’re pleased to offer an equally effective alternative with the MILD procedure, which stands for minimally invasive lumbar decompression. This procedure is designed to create more space in your spinal canal by removing excess ligament and bone tissue. And we can do all of this in about an hour and send you home afterward.
When we perform the MILD procedure, we first make you comfortable with a local anesthetic and sedation, depending upon your needs. From there, we only need to make one very small incision (about the size of a baby aspirin), through which we thread specialized tools to remove the excess ligament and bone tissue that’s pressing up against your nerves.
To guide us, we use real-time imaging, which allows us to visualize our work in great detail.
Other great benefits of the MILD procedure include:
Given these benefits, it’s little wonder why the satisfaction rate for MILD is so high at 85%.
If you’d like to see whether MILD might hold the key to getting back to a life in which you can move without pain again, we invite you to contact us at one of our three conveniently located offices in Jacksonville, Hampstead, or New Bern, North Carolina, to schedule a consultation.
