A lot of people have bulging disks without pain. About half in this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8208267/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8208267/ S

A lot of people have bulging disks without pain. About half in this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8208267/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8208267/ So the MRI should be treated as a correlating factor only. No bulging disk and pain is probably the more immediately useful finding, because you take out a likely cause.