Dr. Ian Bulow of Revive Upper Cervical in Cranberry Twp discusses Sciatica. Sciatica is named after the Sciatic Nerve. It is the nerve that helps your brain communicate with the lower leg. It starts in the nerve roots in your lower back’s lumbar spine.
What is Sciatica?
Sciatica is when you feel pain that goes down the back of your leg. It happens because of a big nerve in your body called the sciatic nerve. This nerve goes from your lower back all the way down to your toes.
What Causes Sciatica?
There are a couple of things that can make your sciatic nerve hurt:
- A Misaligned Spine and Pelvis: Sometimes, your back and pelvis can get all out of whack. This can make the muscles in your back and leg tighten up and put pressure on your sciatic nerve.
- Muscle Tightness: The muscles around your spine can also squeeze the sciatic nerve. This can happen because of the way you move or sit.
10 Symptoms of Sciatica
- Pain in Your Leg: The most common sign is a pain that starts in your lower back and goes down one leg.
- Hip Pain: Your hip can hurt, too.
- Numbness: You might feel a tingling or numbness in your leg or foot.
- Muscle Weakness: Your leg or foot might feel weak, making it hard to move.
- Shooting Pain: Sometimes, you get sharp, shooting pains down your leg.
- Difficulty Standing: Standing up straight can be tough because of the pain.
- Sitting Trouble: Sitting for a long time can also be uncomfortable.
- Coughing or Sneezing Pain: Even a cough or sneeze can make the pain worse.
- Trouble Walking: Walking might become a challenge because of the discomfort.
- Lower Back Ache: Along with leg pain, your lower back might hurt too.
If you have these symptoms, it could be a sign of sciatica. It’s a good idea to talk to a doctor to figure out the best way to feel better.
What Can You Do About It?
If you ever feel this kind of pain, there are a few things you can try:
- Stretching: Sometimes, you can make the pain go away by doing some special stretches. You can find these stretches online, and they can help relax those tight muscles.
- Spine Alignment: If stretching doesn’t help or if the pain keeps coming back, you might need to check your spine. Sometimes, your spine can be out of place, and that’s what’s causing the pain. Don’t worry; doctors can help you with this. They will check your spine and pelvis and make sure they’re in the right position.
What happens is it comes out from a little interspace between your sacrum, the bone kind of at the base of your spine, and your ilium, your hip bone, the bone that you sit on, your sitting bone.
It comes through a grouping of muscles and kind of comes out of this little pocket and goes down the back of the leg. Now, a couple of things can happen if someone has an irritation on that sciatic nerve.
You’re going to get, first of all, a lot of nerve based symptoms. When you talk about nerves, you have numbness, tingling, pins and needles, and unfortunately, shooting pain.
If someone has pain, it could originate in the lower back, but very often you’ll have it kind of right deep in the butt muscles. You’ll have this sharp, burning, searing pain, and it’ll tend to travel down the back of the leg, down the back of the thigh.
It can go all the way down into the cal and all the way into the heel. It can be really painful or it can be like a dull toothache. There’s a variety, and we’ve seen it all.
How Can You Get Help?
If you’re not sure why you have sciatica or if you need help with your spine, it’s a good idea to talk to a doctor or specialist. They can figure out what’s going on and give you steps to fix it.
Sure, here’s a simplified version of those paragraphs:
To understand sciatica, we need to check if the spine and hips are balanced. If they aren’t, it can bother the nerves that make up the sciatic nerve and make certain muscles work too hard. So, it’s really important to pay attention to this.
If someone is doing stretches and getting massages to ease sciatic pain but it’s still bothering them, it might be because the spine and hips aren’t in the right position.
Sometimes, the spine can get out of place over time. Usually, it’s because of accidents or injuries that damage the spine’s connective tissue.
When we talk about posture, we don’t really think about it. But it took you a year as a toddler to figure out how to stand upright against this thing that we call gravity. We have to stand nice and tall. But over the years, if we have these accidents and injuries, the tissue can actually tear loose on the spine, and the spine kind of breaks down in this misaligned state.
Now, we get the neck shorter, back, hip pain, and if it’s bad enough and it hits these nerves, one of them being a sciatic, we can have this sciatica down the back of the leg.
So here’s the deal. If you know someone who needs a professional look at dealing with these issues, please give us a call. If they’re in the greater Pittsburgh area where our clinic is located, we’d love to be able to help them. If they’re outside of our region of the world, we’d like to connect them with someone who can help.
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To schedule a consultation with Revive Upper Cervical Chiropractic, call 724-772-7060, or fill out the form below.
If you are in or around the Cranberry Township area and are looking for an opinion regarding your stress. In that case, you can visit Dr. Bulow at the Revive Upper Cervical Chiropractic. Our practice is open Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 9 am to 6 pm; Wednesday from 1 pm to 6 pm. You can also drop by on Fridays between 9 am to 12 noon.
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