Sciatica might be one of the most painful conditions that one can have. It is so painful that you will be unable to sit, walk or sleep. The pain will be everywhere – your legs, buttocks, back, and even your arms. The pain can last for days, and it can be so intense that you will be unable to do any work. You need to be proactive and address the problem early on. This blog will help you do that.
What happens if you don’t treat sciatica? Oh, you got a pain in the butt. Terrible, right? But there’s a lot more we can learn from this.
Here is a great story for you:
I am the oldest brother in my family. Therefore, the best brother, right? Arguably.
So, anyway, what does the oldest brother do if his mom says you can’t go outside if you don’t clean up your room? If it were me, I would take all the stuff out of my room and put it in my middle brother’s room so I can go play outside.
Now, my second brother is pretty smart. He figured out: “If I don’t get this junk out of my room, I can’t play outside.” Then, of course, he remembers, he’s got one more little brother. So now, he is going to take both of our junk and put it in our youngest brother’s room so he can play outside. “Let him deal with that!”, he thinks.
Think about it. If you have a five-year-old, trying to clean up all that junk left by his two older brothers, the carpet may have a slice of pizza face down, markers with no caps on, toys everywhere, what have you. In short, the carpet will never be the same.
How the story is analogous to sciatica?
If somebody has had some case of bad nerve root issue causing sciatica, there’s often a lot of neural inflammation.
The sciatic nerve, one of the biggest in the body, pushes the inflammation down until it’s away from the big nerves towards the middle nerves. Those middle nerves, in turn, won’t like the inflammation too. They will follow suit and shove it down until the situation is in the smaller nerves.
Once the smaller nerves are affected, there will be no other small nerves to help. The smaller nerves will have to take care of the metabolism, the breaking down of inflammation, and the changes that happen to neural surfaces.
This is important because these consequences mean that the nerves that are completely different from your initial injury sometimes years later can have problems.
Something cool about nerves:
Your skin, for example, is composed of overlapping tiny little dots. These dots are cells, that make up your skin, and are always turning over, renewing, and becoming new cells. Your nerves are the opposite. You have a single nerve that starts in your spinal cord and goes all the way down to your toes.
It’s a bundle of those nerves that make up the sciatic nerve. If one of your nerves is irritated, it will create a problem that makes it harder for resources to travel from your toes back up to the rest of your body. This is because the tip of the nerve is all the way down in your toes. This could be why it becomes harder to get rid of the junk that builds up over time near the tip of the nerve. Your peripheral nerves are the ones that see the most accumulation of this type of junk. The furthest reach that your body has a harder time cleaning up. Peripheral neuropathy happens when the tips of the nerves start to get damaged and they move backward.
Is there something that can be done about it?
There aren’t any tiny microscopic vacuum cleaners to help clean out all the debris left in the tiniest of the nerves. The healthiest thing that you can do is improve the circulation in your body.
Circulation is the fountain of youth. Exercising is important to get circulation because it helps your muscles massage the nerves and mobilize the fluid transmission. This is important because it helps recycle the fluid and surface it, including the debris and metabolic byproducts. The more circulation you can get into your toes and calf, the better.
The act of circulating blood throughout the body will help to bring much-needed resources to the farthest reaches of the sciatic nerve to repair and restore it to health.
Tricks and Tips from Wellward
At Wellward, we aim to help anyone who had sciatica as well as those who have seen something a little bit further down because of it.
We’ll recommend great exercises. We also have treatments like electrical acupuncture, a Class 4 MLS laser, (a fantastic treatment for neuropathic pain), and more. Orthobiologics are things that we use to regenerate joints. We can also use it to stimulate repair around nerves. We’ve had great outcomes with people who have chronic sciatica and peripheral neuropathy.
The majority of the treatments that we see are the mainstream treatments that are very common today. Some treatment options are not very common but have made a big impact on the patients that we see.
Don’t let nerve damage happen to you! Address your sciatica symptoms early on, and if they don’t go away after a reasonable amount of time, seek help. There are many treatment options available, some more conservative than others. At Wellward, we offer exercise recommendations and orthobiologics for treatment. If you think you may be suffering from sciatica or another nerve-related injury, please schedule a discovery call with us so that we can assess the situation and recommend the best possible course of action for you. Thanks for reading!
If you’re experiencing long-standing sciatica and its effects and would like help getting to the bottom of it, we’d be happy to schedule a discovery call with you. During this call, we can discuss your symptoms in more detail and come up with a plan tailored specifically for you.
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DISCLAIMER: The information in this email is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All content is for general informational purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional
