Diagnosed With Spinal Stenosis? You May Be a Candidate for the mild® Procedure

You used to move with ease, but these days, lumbar spinal stenosis has you pinned down. Whether you have leg pain when you walk or if standing up straight is nearly impossible thanks to back pain, you need a solution to restore your ability to move freely again.

That solution may lie in our innovative and minimally invasive mild® procedure at Sunshine Spine and Pain Specialists, PLLC. Understanding that lumbar spinal stenosis is a common and potentially life-altering problem, Dr. Amanda Fernandez and Dr. Peter Fernandez are pleased to include the mild procedure among our many effective pain management services.

Let’s take a look at how this innovative approach to lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) works.

LSS — a narrow problem

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what’s going on in your spine when you have spinal stenosis, but we want to provide a quick review.

With spinal stenosis, there’s a narrowing in your spinal canal that compresses the sensitive nerve fibers and roots that use this passageway. As a result of this nerve compression, you can experience pain, numbness, and tingling in your lower back, and these symptoms often travel down the nerve fibers into your buttocks and legs.

The narrowing in your spinal canal is typically due to degenerative changes, which is why LSS affects 11% of older adults in the United States.

Decompressing the nerve with mild

Since nerve compression is the culprit behind your increasing inability to move without pain, that’s the area we want to address. And this is exactly what we accomplish with the mild procedure. During this minimally invasive treatment, we create more space for your nerves to increase your mobility and relieve your pain.

We mentioned earlier that spinal stenosis is normally due to degenerative changes in the spine, but we want to expand on this a little. As you age, bone spurs can develop in the spine and the ligaments that support it can thicken. In fact, these two issues most often lead to LSS.

When we perform the mild procedure, we use an imaging machine and specialized tools to remove pieces of bone and ligament to relieve the pressure on your nerves.

There are many advantages to the mild procedure, such as:

• We only make one small incision
• We don’t use general anesthesia
• We perform the mild procedure in about an hour, and you’re free to go home afterward
• We don’t make any structural changes that would preclude future treatments

When you get home, you shouldn’t feel any discomfort, and you can return to your normal activities in about 24 hours. But we want you to get back to your old normal, not the new normal you were dealing with thanks to LSS symptoms. During the weeks following your mild procedure, we want you to increase your activity levels.

We’ve been helping people move more freely with mild, and we have plenty of success stories that we’re happy to share with you. We can also refer you to studies such as this one, which found that mild "is an effective and safe procedure [that] can reduce pain intensity and improve functional status significantly.”

If you’d like to explore whether the mild procedure might be just the solution you’ve been looking for, we invite you to contact our Sarasota, Florida, office to schedule a consultation. Call 941-867-7463 or use our online booking request form.