Do lots of people get cervical myelopathy, or is it unusual?

Not very frequent: Cervical myelopathy means the discs are compressing the spinal cord, causing spinal cord dysfunction, no just pain, they have to have weakness in there legs and sensory symptoms --this is rare more common cervical radiculopathy, where a disc compress one nerve root coming out, cause weakness, numbness and pain in one arm.

Not unusual : It is not an infrequent finding. In many cases symptoms may be very mild or not noticed by the patient but may be observed by a significant other. So the overall numbers are tough to know. Disc herniations and arthritis leading to canal narrowing with cord compression are the most common reasons for this issue.