What is Sciatica?

The largest nerve in your body is the sciatic nerve. It starts in your lower back in the spinal cord. At each segment of your lower spine a nerve root exits and joins together to form the large sciatic nerve branching out down your hips and buttock area down your legs & feet. Sciatica is pain, numbness, or cramping radiating along the path of that sciatic nerve from your back, hip, buttock and down your leg. Some patients feel a weakness, cramping or numbness in the affected leg and/or foot; sometimes just the legs or feet are affected with no back pain at all.

It doesn’t take much to trigger a sciatic episode. It can come on gradually starting as a vague pain or weakness and slowly increase until you can’t ignore it. You can simply sneeze, casually get up from a chair, or just bend over to pick up a piece of paper or tie your shoes and it can strike like a lightning bolt out of nowhere.

Causes of Sciatica Pain

But it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It usually comes from a poorly functioning, misaligned spine. Misalignments can be silent and initially you often don’t feel them. You can walk around, play soccer, pick up your child, and feel nothing (your body compensates for the imbalance) yet you’re continually putting stress on that slight misalignment. Months or years later that slight misalignment will silently cause more serious damage to your spine like disc disease (bulging/herniated discs) or arthritis and stenosis. These problems will push on the sciatic nerve sending signals of pain, or numbness, or cramps down through the nerve. Unfortunately, by the time you actually feel it, it’s usually progressed into a serious condition.

  • Misalignment of the spine (subluxation)
  • Disc disease: bulging, herniated discs
  • Arthritis or osteoarthritis
  • Spinal stenosis

Treating Sciatica with Chiropractic Care

As a chiropractor, my main focus is on the spine and nervous system. Your spine protects the nervous system and all the nerves that exit from the spine and travel throughout the body. When a patient has sciatica, my objective is to find the cause of the sciatic pain and correct it. Once the problem has been corrected, function and mobility are restored to the body and the nervous system. Removing the pressure on the nerves and correcting the underlying source of the problem allows the body to heal and the symptoms of pain to go away.

Berardis Family Chiropractic helps patients dealing with sciatica on a daily basis, and has had great success in correcting the problems that cause sciatica. Sciatica is a problem that chiropractic care is able to correct, and not something you should routinely take pain medications for. The medication made hide the pain for awhile, but it will not correct the problem.

Please call us at 914.962.1234 to arrange an appointment with Berardis Family Chiropractic so we may help you deal with sciatica. Once we locate the source of your pain, we will work with you to bring relief from sciatic leg pain and lower back pain. You can also contact us using our appointment form. If you find this article helpful, please recommend it to your friends and family.