Most of the cauda equina cases that I see involve a patient either going to their primary care physician or to the
emergency room over multiple visits. The classic fact pattern is a patient is going in with um symptoms that are
really increasing and evolving and neurological deficits that are getting worse over time. They may come in for
their first visit with their doctor and be experiencing low back pain. They may return and because they’re having numbness now in their saddle area, the
part of your body that touches a saddle when you sit on a horse. And then soon they’re having a inability to feel a bowel movement pass. They’re feeling numbness in one or both of their legs.
And the physician doesn’t act on that.
They don’t make a referral to a neurosurgeon or they don’t order an urgent MRI. And so the issue goes
undiagnosed and because it goes undiagnosed it goes untreated until the patient effectively be can become um permanently injured neurologically.