Most spinal bone spurs are treated without surgery. The standard approach starts with simple home remedies and moves to physical therapy, injections, and potentially surgery only if symptoms persist or worsen. Many people with bone spurs on their spine never need an operation, and a significant number have bone spurs that cause no symptoms at all and require no treatment.
Bone spurs (osteophytes) form when the body tries to repair wear and tear on spinal joints by growing extra bone. They become a problem only when they press on the spinal cord, nerve roots, or surrounding tissue, causing pain, stiffness, numbness, or weakness.
Home Treatments That Work as a First Step
If your bone spur symptoms are mild to moderate, home care is the typical starting point. Applying ice to the affected area periodically helps reduce swelling around the spur. Over-the-counter anti-inflammatory pain relievers like ibuprofen target both pain and the inflammation that makes bone spurs symptomatic. Acetaminophen can help with pain but doesn’t address inflammation directly. If you’re using a combination product with both, the general limit is no more than 4,000 milligrams of acetaminophen in a 24-hour period.
Short rest periods between activities that trigger symptoms give inflamed tissue time to settle down, but extended bed rest isn’t recommended. Staying active matters. Choose low-impact activities like walking instead of running, warm up before exercise, and focus on proper form to minimize joint stress. Supportive accessories like ergonomic chair pads can also reduce pressure on the affected area of your spine throughout the day.
Why Weight Management Makes a Real Difference
Excess body weight puts constant mechanical stress on spinal joints and accelerates the degeneration that leads to bone spur growth. If you’re carrying extra weight, losing even a moderate amount reduces the load your spine absorbs with every step. This won’t shrink existing bone spurs, but it can slow further growth and ease the symptoms you already have. Your BMI can give you a rough sense of whether your weight is contributing to the problem.
Physical Therapy and Professional Care
When home treatments aren’t enough, physical therapy is often the next step. A therapist works on correcting your posture and strengthening the muscles that support your spine, which takes pressure off the areas where bone spurs are compressing nerves. Core strengthening, flexibility work, and targeted stretches for the neck or lower back (depending on where your spurs are located) form the backbone of most programs. Osteopathic manipulation, where a provider uses hands-on techniques to adjust spinal alignment, is another option.
Your provider may also prescribe muscle relaxers if muscle spasms around the bone spur are contributing to your pain.
Steroid Injections for Targeted Relief
If bone spurs are causing significant nerve compression, especially in the lower back, an epidural steroid injection can deliver anti-inflammatory medication directly to the inflamed area around your spinal nerves. The steroid calms swelling and irritation in the epidural space, which is the region surrounding the spinal cord, and this can provide weeks to months of relief.
These injections aren’t a permanent fix. They reduce inflammation temporarily, giving your body a window to heal or giving you the ability to participate more fully in physical therapy. Most providers limit you to two or three epidural steroid injections per year because repeated use can weaken nearby bone and tissue. A cortisone injection at the specific pain site is another option for more localized relief.
When Surgery Becomes Necessary
Surgery enters the conversation when conservative treatments have failed over several months and the bone spur is causing progressive nerve damage, significant weakness, or severe pain that limits your daily life. The goal of surgery is always the same: remove enough bone to take pressure off the spinal cord or nerve roots.
The most common procedure is a laminectomy, where the surgeon removes part or all of the lamina, the bony arch on the back of each vertebra that covers the spinal canal. This widens the canal and relieves compression. During the procedure, the surgeon also removes the bone spurs themselves using small instruments, taking away the smallest amount of bone possible to get the job done. A laminectomy can be performed in the lower back (lumbar) or the neck (cervical), depending on where the problem is.
If a herniated disc is involved alongside the bone spur, the surgeon may perform a discectomy at the same time, removing the damaged portion of the disc. In some cases, a foraminotomy is done instead, which specifically widens the small opening where a nerve root exits the spine. Spinal fusion, where two or more vertebrae are permanently joined, is sometimes added to stabilize the spine after bone and disc material have been removed.
What Recovery From Surgery Looks Like
Recovery depends on whether you have a minimally invasive or open procedure. For a laminectomy, you can typically return to light activity within 4 to 6 weeks. Normal activity, including most work and exercise, generally takes 8 to 12 weeks. Minimally invasive approaches tend to fall on the shorter end of that range because they involve smaller incisions and less disruption to surrounding muscle.
In the early weeks, you’ll likely have restrictions on bending, lifting, and twisting. Physical therapy after surgery helps rebuild strength and flexibility. Most people notice improvement in nerve-related symptoms like numbness and shooting pain relatively quickly after the procedure, though full recovery of nerve function can take longer if the compression was severe or longstanding.
Symptoms That Need Immediate Attention
In rare cases, bone spurs in the lower spine can compress the bundle of nerves at the base of the spinal cord, a condition called cauda equina syndrome. This is a medical emergency. The warning signs include sudden or worsening lower back pain combined with difficulty urinating or having bowel movements, loss of bladder or bowel control, numbness spreading through your inner thighs and buttocks, or progressive leg weakness that makes walking difficult. If you experience these symptoms together, go to an emergency room. Delayed treatment can result in permanent nerve damage.