Don't be a victim of your diagnosis
Degenerative disc disease, degenerative joint disease, and stenosis are very common...often frightening diagnosis. It often leaves you with a feeling of despair, anxiety, or even depression. I often hear complaints like "I can't lift things up at home because my arthritis", "Well I have degenerative disc disease so I know I'll have pain the rest of my life", or "My doctor said I'm bone on bone so I'll always have this pain". While it maybe true that you have some of these diagnosis, it's not a life sentence for pain.
It's so incredibly often that people have these diagnosis and have absolutely no pain at all. Last year a study by Nakashima was published and it looked at over 1200 people who had no neck pain. Individuals between the ages of 20-80 had MRI's to see what was going on in their spines. 87.6% of the participants had degenerative changes, including disc herniations, but had no pain at all! A study that looked at all levels of the spine (cervical, thoracic, and lumbar) revealed that more than 50% of all people between the ages of 30-39 had degenerative changes....but NO pain. The study even went on to say that "when degenerative spine findings are incidentally seen, they should be considered as normal age-related changes rather than pathologic processes." Or as I heard a colleague once say it's having wrinkles on the inside!
These findings aren't just limited to the spine though. In 2011, Girish et al used diagnostic ultrasound to look at 150 pain-free shoulders. Guess what they found? Abnormalities in 96% of the shoulders. That's pretty much every shoulder that they did an ultrasound on had some sort of abnormal finding! And no pain!
All these above findings are actually really encouraging to me. This just tells us that if you have abnormal findings on an Xray, MRI, Ultrasound, etc., they better correlate very well to the physical examination that was done prior to the imaging. If they don't...there is a good possibility that you're just aging very normally!
If you have any questions about a musculoskeletal diagnosis that you've received, please call or email us and we will spend the time to help you understand what it means or what it doesn't mean.
Brinjikji W, Luetmer PH, Comstock B, et al. Systematic Literature Review of Imaging Features of Spinal Degeneration in Asymptomatic Populations. American Journal of Neuroradiology. 2015;36(4):811-816. doi:10.3174/ajnr.A4173.
Girish G, Lobo LG, Jacobson IA, Morag Y, Miller B, Iamadar DA. Ultrasound of the shoulder: asymptomatic findings in men. JR Am J Roentgenol. 2011 Oct;197(4):W713-9. doi: 10.2214/AJR.11.6971.
Nakashima H, Yukawa Y, Suda K, Yamagata M, Ueta T, Kato F. Abnormal Findings on Magnetic Resonance Images of the Cervical Spines in 1211 Asymptomatic Subjects. Spine. 2015;40(6):392-398. doi:10.1097/BRS.0000000000000775.