Are you Suffering from Back Pain or Sciatica?
The team at Function Better Physical Therapy can diagnose and begin treatment with a Free consultation! Simply fill out the contact form and one of our staff will start you on the path to recovery and wellness.
Back Pain and Sciatica can be persistent and chronic or it can come and go. It can be sharp searing pain or it can be a dull and nagging ache. Sometimes it can appear spontaneously with no apparent cause and other times it may build gradually and just make your life difficult. Regardless of how it presents itself, Back Pain and Sciatica are your body’s warning sign that something is wrong and identifying the actual cause is critical right from the beginning. When you ignore the squealing sound on your car as your brake pads are wearing thin, damage spreads to the rotors, gets worse, and costs you much more than it would have if you just replaced the brake pads in the first place.
Similarly, your nagging Back Pain and Sciatica can lead to many other problems and eventually lead to a surgical case if you don’t take care of it early.
Medication is a quick fix, but it is far from a solution. It can certainly help you get some much needed sleep and it will block your pain temporarily, but don’t stop there. You see, if you don’t identify and fix the underlying cause of your Back Pain and Sciatica, it will never go away completely and will likely haunt you for years to come. Your absolute best approach is to have a very thorough Spine and Sciatica examination provided by a Doctor of Physical Therapy.
Back Pain can simply be the result of poor postural habits or improper lifting technique that places abnormal loading stress on muscles, ligaments, spinal joints, intervertebral discs, and nerves. The Back Pain can be caused by tension or compression or just plain overload. Your deep abdominals and other spinal muscles may be weak and unable to support specific work or recreational activities. Your bed may be part of the problem or even the fact that your mom, dad, grandmother, or grandfather suffered with Spine conditions can be contributory in some way. Driving and/or sitting in the office for prolonged periods can weaken the discs in your Back and can lead to disc bulging and/or disc herniations. Depending on prominent activities and or positions sustained in your life, your Spine or a particular vertebrae may move too much or not enough and these abnormalities can cause undue stress on other bodily structures.
Your Back Pain can stem from Arthritis and/or other degenerative disease in your Spine. The bony outlets through which Your Spinal Cord and Nerves travel can be narrowed or obstructed in some other way. In fact, your Back Pain could have absolutely nothing to do with your Back and could represent some other underlying condition. These are all just a small percentage of the vast complexities leading to Back Pain so you can begin to realize the importance of a very thorough, skilled Spine examination. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t first identify it. If you treat the symptoms you will feel better temporarily, but if you treat the underlying cause you can get rid of the Back Pain for good or at least manage it successfully and independently.
Sciatica is a very prevalent condition referring to “pain down the back of your leg” and it involves some type of abnormal compression or stretching of your Sciatic Nerve. Sciatica, like Back Pain, warrants a skilled examination performed by a Doctor of Physical Therapy as there are many different underlying causes and the reason for your Sciatica needs to be identified before any form treatment can be recommended.
Your Sciatic Nerve starts in your Lower Back and travels in and out of soft tissues and other structures all the way down to your foot. Abnormal compression, stretching, or loading can occur anywhere along the length of this nerve and this is exactly what needs to be identified. A skilled, Doctor of Physical Therapy can determine precisely where the problem is and more often than not, fix the abnormality and free you of this relentless pain referred to as Sciatica.