What is Sciatica?

 Hey everybody,

it’s Doctor Andrew with Optimal Chiropractic. One thing we hear a lot about is sciatica. People are coming in, they’re saying, my sciatic hurts. A lot of people don’t officially know what it really is, so I wanted to just explain to you and then just explain how we can help with it as well too.

When people say sciatica, they’re referring to the sciatic nerve. So I brought my handy spine out here, and basically it is this nerve, and then these next three going down, all forming, come down right around the glute area, form a big sciatic nerve, it’s called, it’s about the size of your thumb, and that will run all the way down to your toes.

So that’s what they’re referring to as the sciatic nerve. Sciatica is basically them explaining that these nerves are being irritated in some way, shape, or form. What we see in our office as chiropractors is that the vertebrae of these L4, L5, and S1 down here usually then has some sort of irritation, misalignments. We have the discs in between here that can get compressed, really smashed down there and that will then put pressure on those nerves as well too.

So what we do as chiropractors is we go in, we do an x ray on most of our new patients that will show me the damage going on in the spine and that can lead us to what is causing the sciatic pain that you’re dealing with. That’ll give us a good idea of how, what the condition of the spine is and how much damage in there.

And then what we need to do to adjust it, move those vertebrae properly to get that pressure off of those nerves. We also add a spinal decompression in our office if you guys haven’t heard of that, but that’s when we can actually stretch the spine out and it’ll actually open up those nerve holes along with put some new life into those discs and nutrients that help plump those discs up a little bit more that help take pressure off those nerves as well too.

So if you ever hear someone discussing sciatica or sciatic pain send them to a chiropractor first of all, but we’d love to help them out. We do an x ray on all of our new patients. That’s going to help show us how much damage is going on there. And if it really is sciatic pain in general as well, too. So appreciate you listening.

Let us know if there’s any way we can help at all.