8 Sciatica Myths that May be Making Your Life Miserable

From care2.com/greenliving

You may know that the sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in your body. It extends from the lower back to the back of each leg.
However, if you think sciatica is a medical condition, you’ve fallen victim to a common myth. Sciatica is not a medical condition but a symptom of an underlying condition such as spinal stenosis, a lumbar herniated disc, or degenerative disc disease.
In fact, that’s not the only common myth about sciatica. Below are eight sciatica myths that may make your life miserable.

Myth #1: Sciatica Only Affects Inactive People

Even though sedentary people have a higher risk of sciatica compared to active people, both groups are at risk.
Carrying heavy loads and twisting your back can massively increase the risk of sciatica among active people. Poor form while exercising and skipping stretching after workouts are contributing factors as well.

Myth #2: Surgery Is the Only Way to Treat Sciatica

Most cases of sciatica can be treated in just six weeks using nonsurgical methods, but severe and debilitating cases may require surgery to prevent further damage.
Note that infrequent and irritating sciatica pain may get worse if you ignore it, so seek treatment as soon as possible.

Myth #3: You Should Rest if You Have Sciatica

Research shows that staying in bed all day won’t get rid of the agonizing pain. You’re better off staying active and doing exercises that may help reduce sciatica pain.
In some cases, staying inactive can worsen the pain because it’ll lead to weak back muscles and tight hamstrings, which have been linked to lower back pain.

Myth #4: Leg Pain Means You Have Sciatica

Most people self-diagnose sciatica if they have leg pain and back pain, but realize that pain in your legs and back can be unrelated.
You may experience back pain due to muscle knots, muscle tightness or poor posture. Leg pain, on the other hand, may be triggered by cellulitis, muscle strains and vascular issues. Talk to your doctor, if you have chronic leg or back pain to find out the true cause.

Myth #5: If You Have Sciatica, the Pain Will Never Go Away

This myth wasn’t born out of thin air. Many people are frustrated because they’ve undergone numerous different treatment methods without success. However, sciatica is curable. You just need a skilled doctor who can pinpoint the problem and use the right method of treatment.

Myth #6: Medications Are the Best Way to Treat Sciatica

Taking medications may seem like the easiest way to treat sciatica but they’re not very effective. Research shows there’s low-quality evidence the drugs used to treat sciatica are effective. For people with severe symptoms, antidepressants, opioid analgesics, NSAIDs and corticosteroids may not help at all.

Myth #7: Nobody Knows What Causes Sciatica

Sciatica occurs when your sciatic nerve is compressed or pinched. The compression can be caused by a herniated disc, narrowing of the spinal canal or bony growth.

Myth #8: Treatment for All Patients is the Same

The treatment method that works for another person may not work for you, even when you share the same symptoms. Your treatment has to be based on your specific symptoms and cause of pain.

https://www.care2.com/greenliving/8-sciatica-myths-that-may-be-making-your-life-miserable.html

When Back Pain Extends Down to the Feet

From sg.news.yahoo.com

If you persistently experience lower back pain radiating to your hips, buttocks, back of your legs and even to your feet, you may have sciatica.

Sciatic pain is often accompanied by numbness, weakness and tingling sensations in the legs, particularly on one side of the body. This is the result of the sciatic nerve being compressed by a herniated disc or slipped disc, bone spur or very rarely, a tumour.

Most people will recover from short-term or acute sciatica with some bed rest, pain relief medications and gentle, stretching exercises. Those with chronic sciatica will typically need a combination of pain relief medications, physiotherapy and exercise.

What is the sciatic nerve?

The sciatic nerve is the longest nerve in the body. It runs from the back of the pelvis to the buttocks and all the way down both legs to the feet. You may experience mild to extreme lower back pain and pain in the buttocks and legs when any part of the sciatic nerve is compressed or irritated.

What causes sciatica?

Common causes for sciatica are:

• Herniated disc in the lumbar spine (lower back)
  When the protective cushion (disc) between the lumbar vertebrae ruptures due to disc degeneration or spinal injury, it may press on the sciatic nerve and cause nerve irritation and inflammation. This can lead to pain and numbness in the buttocks and back of the legs.

Bone spursWhen bony growths on the lumbar vertebrae compress any part of the sciatic nerve, they can cause pain, numbness and tingling sensations in the lower part of the body

Symptoms of sciatica

Coughing or sneezing usually makes sciatic pain worse. Sciatica is recognisable based on the nature and location of the pain:

1. Radiating pain from the buttocks to the leg (usually on one side of the body)
2. Tingling sensations down the leg
3. Leg numbness and muscle weakness that impede walking
4. Sudden shooting pain that makes standing up difficult.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/back-pain-extends-down-feet-081737737.html

Feeling hip! How to keep your hips in shape as you age

From startsat60.com

Hip problems can be debilitating and hard to shake, mainly because the hip is a part of our body we use the most, similar to our lower back. And like the lower back, many hip ailments actually stem from other sites in the body.

If the brain perceives a physical problem or injury it often targets a big area in your body, which explains why hip and lower back pain is so common. The hip is such a major central joint – it’s the biggest ball-and-socket joint in our body, and can move in all directions. People often think the hip problem is a hip problem but don’t see the whole chain. Problems can spread and present as back pain, knee pain or sciatica.

What is the best way to prevent and approach hip problems?

Think back to when we were kids: we moved a lot, in all directions, pretty much all the time, which meant our hip joints were regularly moving in all available directions.
Gradually, as we age, we move less until the hip is only moving on one plane – up and down, from activity such as walking, sitting down and standing up again.

Key to understanding the hip is appreciating this joint is designed to move. Hip movement maintains lubrication in the joint and strength in surrounding muscles, tendons and connective tissue.

What are some key tips for keeping our hips in shape?

Move your spine: The hips and the spine depend very closely on each other. If you keep moving the spine you’ll be doing your hips a huge favour. Key is remembering the spine needs to move on all three planes (even though most of us mainly move on one plane – back and forward). We must also remember to move side to side, via side bends, and rotate our shoulders left and right like doing the twist, which gently rotates the spine as well.

Strengthen key muscles: your glutes are a key strength muscle group for the hips – I like to call them the ‘anti-gravity’ muscle. Build the glutes and you help the hips.

A sure sign someone’s glutes are not sufficiently strong is when they are not in alignment and one hip looks lower than the other: this is called a Trendelenburg gait.

Your glutes consist of three muscles: gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus. Some good exercises to work these groups include:

Clams: lie on your side with your knees and ankles together, then raise your top knee toward the ceiling, keeping your ankles together; hold then lower your knee slowly. It’s important to do some repetitions on both sides.

Glute bridge: lie on the floor, face up, with knees together and feet flat on the ground. Next, lift your pelvis off the ground until your hips, knees and shoulders are in a straight line – like you are forming a bridge; hold the bridged position for a few seconds and then slowly relax back down.

Hydrotherapy: If stiffness or pain is stubborn, hydrotherapy is excellent for hips. Hydrotherapy in chest-high water takes 75 per cent of your body weight, which allows you to move on all planes more freely.

If issues persist it’s time to see a professional.

https://startsat60.com/health/health-issues/bone-health/hip-health-how-to-keep-hips-healthy-as-you-age

Is Your Back Pain a Sign Of Sciatica?

From reportshealthcare.com

Majority of the people, specifically the adult age group, is prone to body aches, fatigue, and everyday pains due to stressful lifestyles, lack of nutrients in the diet, and not getting the rest that is required by the body to heal itself.
While this is an irritating inconvenience itself that can distract any person from engaging in work or even relaxation activities, it can also be confused with signs and symptoms of other health conditions the person might have.
In a similar way, sciatic nerve pain can also be taken as pain caused by not getting enough rest. In accordance with the statistics, a larger number of young adults today wake up daily to experiencing sciatic nerve pain.
How does one know that they have sciatic nerve pain? If you have ever woken up to nagging pain from upper thighs or in the lower back that tends to spread downwards and does not go away no matter what you try, there is a big possibility you have sciatic nerve pain.

The good news is that typically the pain is temporary and has minor causes. It can go away randomly just as it came. However, given that sciatic nerve is the biggest nerve in the body, the pain can make you deal with extreme discomfort as well as the inability to work.

What Is Sciatic Nerve Pain?

While most of the people are still able to work and manage other stuff in life with a headache, sciatic nerve pain can ruin a person’s whole day. Depending on the intensity of pain, it can even make sitting on an office chair difficult.
The problem in sciatic nerve pain, also commonly known as sciatica begins in the lower back where the sciatic nerve is located and the nerves surrounding it.
When the nerves running along the largest single nerve in the human body, the sciatic nerve, get pinched, extreme pain develops which spreads all the way down in the calves of the legs or sometimes even the feet.
To make matters worse, sciatic nerve pain is often repetitive. Most of the people who develop sciatica have periods of the pain that come and go many times a week or even many times in a single day.
Pain in sciatic pinching has been described as almost intolerable and likely to make a person take a day off from school or office. It primarily affects one leg but can also cause pain in both of the legs at the same time.
Another thing which makes sciatic nerve pain more complex is that the majority of the people who experience it are not aware of how it developed in the first place. Many times, its diagnosis is hard because it gets mixed up with arthritis pain.

How Is Sciatica Treated?

In accordance with studies on treatments of sciatica, many people turn towards painkilling medication or even surgery when the former is proven ineffective as well as for a comparatively faster solution to the unbearable pain.
However, researchers have shown that less invasive alternatives are just as effective when it comes to treating sciatic nerve pain. For example, chiropractic spinal adjustment is a method that is becoming popular in relieving sciatica.
A study published in the Journal of Manipulative Physiological Therapies in 2010 found that around 60% of the people who have sciatic nerve pain who were not able to get rid of their pain by medication found relief in spinal manipulation.
Consequently, many of the medical practitioners have now started suggesting alternative therapies for sciatic nerve pain due to their effectiveness and the fact they come with no side effects, do not harm the nerve anatomy and can help reduce stress levels.
Massage, acupuncture, and yoga are some methods other than spinal manipulation that has shown to work as they work like natural muscle and nerve relaxers.
The plus point to them is they can help in a better range of motion, better immunity, and even increased protection from injuries.

What Causes Sciatic Nerve Pain?

Many people including young adults and even children are now experiencing sciatic nerve pain every other day without even knowing what is causing the pain. According to the researchers, the main reasons behind the pain are inflammation and herniated spinal discs.
For a majority of the adults, the development of sciatic nerve pain is due to herniated spinal discs. This means the disc that is present in the spine has a slight tear or crack in it which stick out into the spinal canal.
A herniated disc that disturbs the spinal canal is also responsible for affecting the chemical messages that are sent to the limbs through the nerves.
If the herniated spinal disc sticks out in a particular area, it ends up pinching the sciatic nerve – the main passageway of communication between the legs and the spine that also connects smaller branches of nerves from the spinal canal to pelvis, legs, feet, and the ankles.
Not everyone who has a crack in their spinal discs develops sciatic nerve pain. People with sciatic nerve pain due to extreme pressure on the spine are also likely to have several other spinal issues specifically the lumbar spinal problems.
In people who belong to the older age groups, sciatic nerve pain occurs due to years of aging, poor posture, too much exercise or lack of exercise, high stress levels, and even injuries on the back.
Aging results in the decrease of spinal fluid and elasticity of the spinal discs making them more prone to cracks.

On the other hand, sciatica was known to occur only due to cracks in the spinal discs until recently when the effects of inflammation on the lumbar spine and spinal discs were studied.
The conclusion that was reached was that sciatica can happen due to lack of nerve root compression due to inflammation.
This causes similar problems and pain as experienced in sciatic nerve pain due to cracks in the spinal discs as it triggers chronic returning episodes of the nerve root which is inflamed.
People who tend to have poor health generally due to unhealthy habits like diets lacking in nutrition, bad postures, disturbed sleep cycles, and high levels of stress can have faster aging of the discs. In the case of herniated discs, inflammation can make the matter worse.

Symptoms of Sciatic Nerve Pain

Statistically, around 1 to 2 percent of the adults experience sciatic nerve pain due to herniated discs at least once in their lives. The condition is much more common than men than in women and usually affects people over the age of 30.
Sciatic nerve pain can occur in anyone from people with an active lifestyle to people with sedentary lifestyles. The symptoms and signs of sciatic nerve pain to watch are:

• Trouble exercising or moving
• Pain while sleeping
• Strong and shooting pain the limbs and lower back that travels downwards
• Inflammation and throbbing in the lower back or the thighs when standing or sitting for a long time
• Tingling and numbness in the limbs
• Inability to flex feet
• Feeling stiff

Sciatic nerve pain can last for different periods of time depending on the person. Normally, it lasts for six weeks and can turn into chronic pain which is unbearable or requires surgery. While it goes away in between the time period, it usually returns stronger.
Sometimes, nerves can be pinched without any pain at all which leaves people not being aware of having some problem with their sciatic nerve. Since normal sciatic pain is extreme, many see a doctor right away but in cases where there is no pain, the pinched nerves can reach a dangerous stage.
The pain in sciatica can also last for a very long time with ongoing problems for a year or two even with proper treatment.
In some cases, ongoing pain in the thighs or lower back can be a symptom of something even more serious like nerve damage or even some disease such as spinal stenosis or piriformis syndrome. Hence, it is better to see a doctor right away if you have continuous pain.

https://reportshealthcare.com/20697/is-your-back-pain-a-sign-of-sciatica/