Midvale City Hall to 900 East
From City Hall on Holden Street, make your way to 7200 South (SR-48) and take I-15 north. About 3 miles later, leave at exit 301, go east on 4500 South for roughly 1.9 miles, and turn right onto 900 East; the plaza comes up on the right a little before the Van Winkle junction.
That's about 6.9 miles. There's another way nobody measured for this page: SR-71 already runs north through the western part of the Fort Union commercial district as 900 East, past Hillcrest High School, and it's the same 900 East the clinic sits on. Live on that side of town? Following it north is worth a try.
The Sandy directions use that highway from even farther south.
Bingham Junction, smelters and the Fort Union side
Midvale was founded in 1909 as Bingham Junction, a rail midpoint for the mining areas of Bingham Canyon and Little Cottonwood. Smelting came first. The Galena smelter went up near the Jordan River in 1873, the USSRMCO smelter was finished in 1902, and its lead operations closed in 1958.
Out west, the old name lives on. Bingham Junction, the former Sharon Steel slag site, came off the EPA's National Priorities List in 2006 and has a Red Line TRAX station of its own, while Midvale Fort Union and Midvale Center stations serve the Blue Line.
I-15 cuts the city in two, with the Jordan River as its western border. Live on one side, work on the other, and the freeway becomes part of your day, along with the seat that comes with it.
So before any appointment, ask yourself a few things. Is your back worse after the drive than before it? Does the pain travel below the knee, or make getting up from a chair the hard part? Those are patterns we associate with a disc.
After the drive: exam, plan, checkpoint
The first appointment is diagnostic. Dr. Cody Mecham goes through your history, does an orthopedic exam and reviews relevant imaging, and decompression is recommended only if a disc looks like the source.
From there it's usually 20 to 30 sessions across 8 to 12 weeks, about 20 to 30 minutes each. Some next-day soreness early on isn't unusual, but real pain during a session means stopping to reassess. If treatments 8 to 12 pass without meaningful change, the plan is reconsidered, and the session-by-session guide explains how.
People with fusion hardware, spinal instability or a fracture, active cancer in the spine, pregnancy or an aortic aneurysm aren't candidates.
Here's the uncomfortable part. Christian Apfel's 2010 DRX9000 study reported pain falling from 6.2 to 1.6 out of 10 in 30 patients, but it had no control group, and herniated discs often shrink without surgery anyway (Wang's 2020 review pooled a regression rate of 63%), so nobody can say how much of that the table did. We go through it properly in does spinal decompression really work.
West of the river, West Jordan leaves I-15 at the same exit 301. Everything else about spinal decompression in Salt Lake City sits on the home page. Questions? Schedule an appointment or ask at (801) 590-8615.