Do you have pain in your lower back? Possibly radiating down one of your legs? Well, this can be a condition known as sciatica. The sciatic nerve is actually the longest and largest nerve in the human body. It runs from your lower back, L4 vertebrae, through S3, which is the sacrum. This one large nerve controls a lot of the muscles down your leg.
Typical symptoms of sciatica are pain in the low back radiating down into your glutes or even into your leg. Sometimes it can be as extensive as shooting pain running all the way down your leg to your foot. Sometimes it can be numbness or tingling in the feet or the lower extremities. Those can all encompass a sciatica problem.
Sciatica is actually a symptom of some other problem. The diagnosis would be something like facet syndrome or piriformis syndrome or degenerative disc disease. These are the problems that create sciatica.
A lot of people might think they have sciatica but that just means they are talking about the pain pattern, not necessarily the actual problem. There could be multiple solutions to this. We have to look at the disc spaces. Maybe you’ve got degenerative disc disease or the facet joints are bad. Maybe it’s just a structural issue with the posture being off and the muscles. Piriformis syndrome can cause sciatica. That’s a problem with the muscles in your glutes where they’re pinching the nerve or irritating the nerve. So we have to really address a whole bunch of factors in the body, not just one.
Check out Stones River Chiropractic. We can take a peek at that for you and hopefully provide a lot more answers and solutions for you to get out of this annoying sciatic pain.
**Check out Dr. Dawes video about sciatica and others like it on our YouTube page.
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