Many middle-aged and elderly people often suffer from back and leg pain, which can seriously affect walking and daily life. When they go to the hospital, they are diagnosed with lumbar spinal stenosis after a CT or MRI examination. Doctors usually recommend surgery, but most patients have various worries about surgery, especially about how the surgery will work. Will it recur? Are there any other alternatives to surgery? Usually, most busy outpatient physicians do not have time to answer these questions in detail, and many patients have to go to other small clinics, community clinics or individual contracted medical institutions. These institutions do not have the conditions and technology to perform surgery for lumbar spinal stenosis, so they recommend physical therapy, medication, or infusion, and there are many new “original” methods that lack scientific basis. These methods are not very costly and do not require surgery, which satisfies the psychological requirements of patients. As a result, many patients with lumbar spinal stenosis undergo various non-surgical treatments in these poorly equipped or less formal medical institutions. The result of treatment is often a certain effect at the time, but soon relapses or worsens instead. These patients usually go to many medical institutions and receive many treatments in order to avoid surgery, and the accumulated costs and time wasted are often staggering, but the problem of lumbar spinal stenosis is not fundamentally solved, and even gets worse. Some patients also come to big hospitals after they have tried various methods that have failed after several twists and turns, and they can easily make up their minds and agree to surgical treatment, when they are often cautioned by well-meaning friends and colleagues: “I know so-and-so who has lumbar spinal stenosis and is paralyzed after surgery.” At this point, the patient’s psychological burden is even heavier, and staying in the hospital for treatment is like going to a “penal colony”. How can patients treat lumbar spinal stenosis correctly in the process of seeking medical treatment? Here I will introduce some common sense to help patients have a correct understanding of lumbar spinal stenosis, so that they can actively cooperate with doctors in treatment. Lumbar spinal stenosis syndrome (LSSS) refers to the abnormal structure of the spinal canal caused by primary or secondary factors, narrowing of the spinal canal cavity, and the emergence of back and leg pain and progressive difficulty in walking, mainly characterized by intermittent claudication. The human spine consists of more than 30 vertebrae, the anterior part of each vertebra is cylindrical in shape, called the vertebral body part, and the posterior part is surrounded by bone in a ring, called the spinal canal. The anterior part of the spine is weight-bearing, and the posterior part of the spinal canal houses the spinal cord and nerves. When the bone tissue and ligamentous tissue structures around the spinal cord proliferate, the canal diameter becomes smaller, resulting in compression of the spinal cord and nerves, and symptoms such as back and leg pain and difficulty walking occur, which is medically known as spinal stenosis. There are many causes of lumbar spinal stenosis, and degenerative changes in the lumbar spine are the most important cause of secondary lumbar spinal stenosis. Similar to the fact that machines wear out over time, the human lumbar spine is slightly different in that it repairs itself when it wears out. The self-repair in the human body is either beneficial or harmful, and the repair phenomena such as bone spur growth and ligamentous hypertrophy caused by lumbar degeneration can cause lumbar spinal stenosis and compression of the spinal cord and nerves. Since degenerative changes in the lumbar spine are the main cause, lumbar spinal stenosis is actually a natural law, just as hair will turn gray and wrinkles will appear on the face as we age. This means that not only is the incidence of this disease high, but it is not surprising. Almost everyone at a certain age will have varying degrees of stenosis in the spinal canal, but most people do not have enough stenosis to develop symptoms of back and leg pain. The clinical symptoms of lumbar spinal stenosis are mainly low back and leg pain, often accompanied by unilateral or bilateral radiating pain and abnormal sensation in the lateral and posterior thighs. The symptoms often increase when walking or standing, and decrease or disappear when squatting or lying down. Unlike low back pain caused by lumbar disc herniation, the pain symptoms are relatively mild, with slow onset and gradual aggravation, and there is no obvious history of lumbar trauma. Most patients feel pain, numbness, soreness and weakness in one or both calves and feet after walking about one or two hundred meters, or standing for a few minutes or more than ten minutes, or have an obvious feeling of heaviness, as if the legs are filled with lead, so that they cannot continue walking and must squat or bend over for a moment before walking again. This phenomenon of walking and stopping is intermittent claudication, which is of great significance for the diagnosis of this disease.