Comment by oarfish

6 days ago

This is well known for spine issues in general: MRI is super unspecific, and the older you get, the more interesting things you can find on the scans. Even if you're fully asymptomatic. So such findings are now better reframed as age-related changed rather than pathologies. The fact that every radiologist will highlight different things also doesn't help.

This is in fact one reason why you don't want an MRI if the outcome does not change what you do (i.e. sports related injuries or non specific low back pain). You will just nocebo yourself into thinking you have problems that are not real, because the belief in the answer donut is so strong.

That makes perfect sense to me.

One nit: this happened to me maybe 20 years ago. It wasn’t even an age-related change. I think it was more like a changing idea of the range of normal human anatomy.