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What is Sciatica?

It starts out as a pain that you can feel in your lower back. Soon the pain begins to travel down one leg and it’s getting more severe. There may be a tingling or burning sensation or your leg may feel numb. At times the pain might be severe, almost overwhelming, but sciatica is really just a symptom of another problem.

The sciatic nerve is the longest nerve in your body. It extends from the lower spine down through the length of both legs. There are a number of conditions that can cause sciatica, including a herniated disc, degenerative disc disease and spinal stenosis – all of which affect the discs that act as “shock absorbers between each pair vertebrae of the spine. These conditions put pressure on the sciatic nerve and it is that pressure or pinching of the sciatic nerve that causes the pain.

Many doctors will prescribe pain medication, anti-inflammatory medication or steroid injections. Worst case scenario? Surgery. What these solutions do, however, is treat the symptoms of sciatica, which is a symptom itself of a nerve disorder, caused by nerve interference, that can be corrected with chiropractic care.

Because sciatica is most often the result of a spinal misalignment in the lower spine, chiropractic care is often very effective in correcting the misalignment, which eliminates the symptoms of sciatica. Said another way – chiropractic adjustments remove the obstruction that is causing the “pinch” in the sciatic nerve, which is causing the pain in the back through the buttocks and down the leg!

The choice is yours. Because most back surgery for sciatica is elective – do you really want to “go under the knife” and risk “failed back surgery syndrome” that can leave you in even greater pain? Or, would you rather come into our practice, where we are trained to locate and correct the cause of the interference in the sciatic nerve, without drugs and surgery. And…chiropractic works. The choice, as always, is yours!