Hunched Over With Lower Back Pain? It Could Be Spinal Stenosis

You prefer to stand tall, but that upright position leads to shooting pain in your lower back and into your leg. And, as soon as you hunch over, it goes away. You could have spinal stenosis.

You used to stand tall, but these days, practicing great posture is becoming near impossible thanks to shooting pain that starts in your lower back and travels down into your buttocks and legs. As soon as you hunch over or sit down, the pain goes away, but you’d prefer not to spend the rest of your life bent over at the waist.

If this scenario sounds familiar, there's a good chance that you might be dealing with spinal stenosis, a common condition that affects 11% of older adults in the United States.

In this month’s blog post, the musculoskeletal expert team at SOAR Spine and Orthopedics wants to shine the spotlight on spinal stenosis, given its high prevalence. In the following, we explore spinal stenosis, its symptoms, and how we can help you stand tall again.

Stenosis — narrowing in your spine

The term stenosis describes a narrowing in your spinal canal, a primary passageway for your nervous system. Over time, degenerative changes in your spine begin to crowd your spinal canal, leaving less room for your nerves. These changes include:

Arthritis
Degenerative disc disease and herniated discs
Sciatica
Bone spurs
Thickened ligaments

These degenerative changes are perfectly normal, and 95% of people show signs of wear and tear in their spines by the time they reach age 50.

As the stenosis progresses, however, the narrowing can compress your spinal cord and sensitive nerve roots and fibers in your spinal canal, leading to symptoms that we review next.

The hallmarks of spinal stenosis

Stenosis can develop anywhere along your spine, but the condition tends to crop up more in the two areas of your spine that enjoy the most movement — your neck and your lower back.

In this discussion, we focus on lumbar spinal stenosis, which leads to a unique set of symptoms that include:

Pain in your lower back
Pain that travels down into one side of your buttocks and your leg
Pain that lessens when you lean forward
Numbness and tingling in your lower back, buttocks, and legs
A heaviness in your legs
Leg cramping

As lumbar spinal stenosis progresses, the pain can increase and become more constant, making every step you take a potentially painful one as the nerve compression in your spinal canal becomes more pronounced.

Standing tall again

We work quickly to relieve your symptoms if, after a thorough evaluation and advanced imaging, the lumbar spinal stenosis is hampering your ability to move freely.

While we can’t turn back the clock on the degenerative changes in your spine, there are steps that we can take to relieve your symptoms, such as:

Our goal is to find non-surgical options for addressing lower back pain caused by spinal stenosis — after all, our mission is to relieve pain, not add to it. In most cases, we found that a combination of the treatments above works well in restoring pain-free movement in our patients.

To figure out which combination of spinal stenosis treatments would be best for your situation, contact one of our offices in Santa Clara or Redwood City, California, today to schedule an appointment with one of our spine experts.