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.
Those nerves come together and form the sciatic nerve, one of the thickest nerves in the human body. It extends down the back of the thigh and divides above the knee joint.
Watch the full video on YouTube or Facebook to learn more about Sciatica and how Upper Cervical Care can help. Full transcript is below
This is Dr. Bulow with Revive Upper Cervical in Cranberry Twp. Throughout the different months we focus on different topics from #ReviveWomensHealth, to #ReviveChiroKids, and this month we are speaking on #ReviveMensHealth. Feel free to look up the different hashtags on the various social medias and learn more.
In #ReviveMensHealth we tend to talk a lot about structural issues: neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain. Today I want to talk about Sciatica. If you know someone in your life that is dealing with Sciatica, or is always complaining they’re always going to the chiropractor, going to the physical therapist, but not finding relief. This might be a video that would be of value to them. Feel free to share it & ask any questions you may have.
You never know who may be dealing with these issues.
Let’s talk about sciatica. Kind of an interesting name, sciatica. It’s named after the nerve – the sciatic nerve. These nerves are what tell your brain what’s going on. The sciatic nerve is the nerve that helps your brain communicate with your lower leg. It starts from the nerve roots in your lumbar spine and your low back.
Those nerves come together and form this great big nerve called the sciatic nerve.- One of the biggest nerves, if not the biggest thickest nerve in the human body.
Pretty BIG nerve!!
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.
Now what do you do about sciatica?
There’s a couple of different things and it really depends on what’s at the root cause of it. That’s why it’s really important to see a professional. Chiropractors, physical therapists, etc. can kind of diagnose things like that.
Someone who’s going to get in there and try to find the root cause of your particular problem. From my observation, most people will first address the muscles, the soft tissues.
They’ll do these stretches where you can take your knee and bring it up to your chest and give it a nice bear hug to stretch out the hamstring. Or they’ll grab a hold of the shin bone, and give that a nice stretch.
When you grab the shin bone and pull it across the body, it stretches the piriformis muscle, which a lot of the time is crimping that sciatic nerve. But what we have to ask ourselves is why are the muscles in spasm in the first place?
To that, we look at the balance of the spine and of the hips. Because if the spine is misaligned and the hips are misaligned, not only can it irritate the nerve roots that actually form the sciatic nerve in the first place, but it can cause these muscles to become overworked. So this is definitely something to look at.
If someone is stretching and having massages done and working on the muscles, but they’re still dealing with this sciatic pain, we probably are dealing with a spinal and pelvic unleveling or misalignment or imbalance.
Spinal misalignment is something that can happen over the years. Typically what we find is that there are accidents and injuries that tear loose the connective tissue of the spine.
All of this leaves the spine in a misaligned state where, when you’re standing, the head will tilt to one side, and one shoulder will be higher than the other. And as a result, yes, one hip will actually be higher than the other.
That can create a lot of pressure, pain, tension, and inflammation.It’s a lot of responsibility for your pelvis, your sacrum, and your illum, your hip bones to hold your whole body upright.
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.
Don’t forget to stay connected with us on socials!! & we’ll see you next time
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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