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Sciatic pain is pain that usually starts in the lower back but spreads down one or both glutes and down the back of the thigh and legs.
At Pacific Coast Osteopathy we are experts at treating sciatic pain:
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Diagnosing what is triggering your sciatic pain.
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Providing the most effective short term treatment.
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Creating a long-term management strategy.
What’s the common cause of sciatic pain?
Sciatic pain is always the result of pressure to part of the sciatic nerve – the biggest and most important nerve in the leg.
Usually, this pressure occurs at what are called the “roots” of the nerve; the part of the nerve that becomes exposed just as it leaves the spinal column but before it splits up and recombines with parts of its neighbouring nerve roots to form the bigger nerves that travel down the leg.
There are a few ways those nerve roots can come under pressure but the most common one is due to something that’s happened to one of the intervertebral disks that happen to sit right next to the gap the nerve roots leave the spine through.
Sometimes just swelling around the disk after it’s been damaged is enough to create that pressure, but if you’re unlucky the gooey centre of the disk (the nucleus pulposus) can work its way out of a tear in the side of the disk and press onto the nerve root directly!
This is just as painful as you might imagine and because our brain can’t figure out exactly what is generating the pain we tend to feel it in places the nerve goes *to*, rather than where the real problem is.
The good news is that there’s probably nothing wrong with your leg no matter how much it hurts, and there’s a lot we can do to get you out of pain and back to normal life A.S.A.P.