I too have suffered with cervical issues for many years. Due to an auto accident when I was seven, I’m 67 now and work related, holding my head at an angle over a drafting table for my career. If you are young one thing to consider is your posture do you look at your phone a lot, so you can have stenosis, cervical stenosis and have zero reason for surgery. With the doctors look at is there a reason for surgery so that is why you need x-rays and MRIs. You also need to go to a variety of doctors I had Botox in my trapezius levator scapula One injected injection lasted 10 years then the following injections not so much. What the doctors look at is whether you have numbness and radiating pains I really didn’t. I had a ton of stenosis, but you can have stenosis as long as you don’t have nerve damage like numbness , then nobody wants to operate on you and there are plenty of things to do like radio frequency ablation epidurals, and cortical steroid injections. There’s also strengthening muscles by getting good physical therapy. Chiropractic is just temporary pain relief. I don’t recommend that I recommend kind of fixing your problem as much as you can with yoga or physical exercise before you need to go to the point of surgery , when my surgery was eventually done last year, my bones fell apart in their hands, so what was supposed to be a great surgery and was for one week turned out to be a nightmare with a second surgery that’s been a year of recuperation yes some of the pain is gone and yes, the surgery was done at a moment in time where I couldn’t function anymore . However, I can tell you that it didn’t solve my pain so now I go for deep myofascial tissue release twice a month and I’ve gone back for Botox, but I don’t know if I’m gonna continue that out my problem. Also muscles and connective tissue that go into a spasm and stay there , so deep tissue massage kind of fixes that. I’m still working at 67 so I just pay attention to my posture and I’m much better off therefore, what I recommend is that you see a variety of doctors both within your system and outside and have them talk to each other and educate yourself and don’t do anything drastic until , things are getting numb and they don’t relieve themselves. Numbness is the presentation that the surgeons want before they do surgery. Good luck.