If you are experiencing a stabbing, shooting pain from your lower back, through your hips, and down into your legs, chances are you are suffering from sciatica. While traditional treatments rely on a combination of drugs and physical therapy, and even invasive surgeries in extreme cases, sciatica pain can often be addressed by a visit to the chiropractor.
What Causes Sciatic Pain?
The sciatic nerve travels down your spine, through your lower back and buttocks, and then splits and runs along each leg. A nerve impingement due to a bone spur, herniated disc, or other abnormality can cause tremendous pain when sitting or walking that radiates from the lower back down into the legs.
Patients can experience shooting pain, a dull ache, “tingles,” or even numbness and loss of motor control in severe cases. Regardless, sciatic pain can present obstacles to movement in daily life as well as making resting, sitting, walking, or standing almost impossible due to the pain.
The problem is that this pain is not a disorder itself but a symptom of a significant problem of damage to the nerve. Therefore, simply treating the symptom does not guarantee that you are treating the root of the problem, which is occurring at the point of nerve damage and not necessarily where you feel the pain.
How Can Chiropractic Care Help With Sciatic Pain?
Like most issues involving nerve-related pain, sciatic pain results from compression of the nerve in question. This could be from a herniated disc, piriformis syndrome, diabetes, prolonged sitting, or a host of other causes. Regardless, the pressure on the nerve must be relieved to get freedom from the pain.
A chiropractic assessment and treatment plan can address the root cause of the pain by addressing the spinal compression. Our chiropractor carefully assesses the patient holistically, looking for alignment issues that could be causing the pain and then performing spinal and musculoskeletal adjustments that realign the body components that are out of balance. Once equilibrium is restored, the body can relax, hold a healthy posture, and relieve the pressure on the nerve.
In addition to spinal adjustments, our chiropractor might encourage you to pursue other treatment options, such as ultrasound, spinal decompression, or ice/cold therapy to relax the tension that could be causing the nerve compression.
The stretches and precisely applied pressure to the joints and spine restore the natural alignment that your body has when it is optimally healthy, and this translates to a reduction in pain. Rather than relying on traditional approaches that simply address the symptoms, your chiropractor will recommend a treatment plan that addresses your total body health. They can then prescribe exercises and a nutrition and wellness plan that address the underlying causes of the sciatic pain in the hopes its return will be prevented.
If you or a loved one is suffering with sciatica, contact our office to schedule a free consultation and examination.