Back pain is one of the hardest things to bear since it can linger for years and impede your ability to enjoy key moments such as family time or vacations. As the name suggests, sciatica describes pain that affects your sciatic nerve.
This nerve stretches all the way up each leg, past the buttocks, and all the way to your lower back through the hips. With the sheer length of the nerve, you can see how sciatica can be a heavy burden to carry. This article will go into the symptoms, causes, and treatments.
Sciatica Symptoms
Lower Back Pain
Of course, the most obvious symptom is lower back pain since the sciatic nerve goes past this region. There are many other things that can cause lower back pain such as arthritis and osteoporosis so it’s a symptom that’s rarely relied on for diagnoses.
Leg Weakness
If you just got home from leg day at the gym then it’s only normal that you can barely stand. However, leg weakness without any clear cause can indicative of sciatica. This is especially true if the weakness is only in one leg since sciatica usually affects one side of the body.
Chronic Posterior Pain
Constant pain on one side of your buttocks is another potential symptom of sciatica. Again, this comes down to the fact that most cases of sciatica only affect one half of your body rather than the entire region.
Common Causes and Risk Factors
- Age-induced bone changes
- Spinal strain due to obesity
- Diabetic neuropathy
- Sedentary lifestyles — sometimes due to neglect and elder abuse
Viable Treatment(s)
Many people turn to NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants, and even steroid injections to treat sciatica. However, before you pump yourself full of pills — hurting your kidneys and liver in the process — you should consider healthier alternatives.
Osteopathy is far less invasive and doesn’t have any of the nasty side effects that you might have to endure if you rely on pharmaceuticals to relieve your pain. Why take a cocktail of drugs to fix an issue if a natural treatment can yield the same result?
In addition to osteopathy, you can also mitigate the pain by getting enough exercise. Regular exercise even staves off heart disease. Normally you’d think that bed rest is the ideal treatment, but that’s not really the case with sciatica since sedentary lifestyles exacerbate the condition.
Overall, osteopathy is the safest option since it holds no risk of unforeseen side effects or substance abuse. You won’t have to worry about the bleeding and bruising that comes with other treatment options such as acupuncture either.
Top Melbourne Sciatica Pain Clinic
Our clinic provides the best pain relief in all of Melbourne. Don’t hesitate to give us a call at (03) 9328-1151 or visit our North Melbourne clinic at 452 Victoria St. We’ll be sure to give you a comprehensive check-up so we can pinpoint the problem and solve it stat.
The clinic is led by Dr Robert McMahon — the director and principal osteopath at North Melbourne Osteopathy — who first got into the field after the treatment helped him recover from a career-ending cricket injury two decades ago.