Many patients with bone spurs freak out when they’re told by their doctors that they have a disease. The good news is that bone spurs have gotten a bum rap.

A bone spur is the body’s natural reaction to pressure on bone. Essentially, the body grows new bone. The most common cause of a bone spur is an unstable joint. When your joint moves in ways it wasn’t designed to move, the body forms a bone spur to stabilize the joint.

Most patients have been told that they need their bone spur surgically removed. This rarely is the case. Since the spur formed to stabilize the joint, removing it merely makes the joint unstable again. Surgery might be a good idea in rare instances when the bone spur is pressing on a nerve or when it is severely restricting range of motion.

A bone spur should be looked at as a symptom and not as a disease. It means the patient has an unstable joint. Stabilizing the joint without surgery usually can be accomplished by several different types of injections that can help to strengthen lax ligaments and weak stabilizing muscles.

Don’t be freaked out if a doctor tells you that you have a bone spur. While a surgeon may have told you that your bone spur needs to be surgically removed, only rarely is this a good idea. A bone spur is a symptom of a bigger instability problem that needs to be fixed. Regenexx doctors have had good success through the years using various types of autologous biologic injections to help stabilize joints.

“What Is a Bone Spur?” first appeared as a post on the Regenexx blog.

Like all medical procedures, Regenexx procedures have a success and failure rate.
Not all patients will experience the same results.