SILVER SPRING, Md. — A panel of medical experts advising the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday decided not to recommend slapping the sternest federal warning on steroid injections for neck and back pain, allowing their use to continue relatively unchanged. Millions of Americans get such treatments annually.

The F.D.A. had asked the panel to weigh in on whether the agency should require labels for the injections to carry the toughest federal warning, a so-called contraindication, that essentially would have signaled to doctors that the risks of use outweighed any possible therapeutic benefit. The agency often takes the advice of its expert panels, though it does not have to.

That wording was too broad, the panel decided, and it asked instead if there were any clinical situations in which the risks of steroid injections were greater than the benefits.

The majority of the panel voted yes — 15 to 7 — but nearly everyone who did so explained that the choice was made based on evidence showing the risks of a specific type of neck injection, a far narrower category of treatment that many doctors say is already being used less frequently.