Sciatica Overview

Transcript

So then we look at patients who have acute back pain, who also have leg pain. And most often this’ll be in a demographic that’s older than teens starting in the 20s more people in their forties and 50s fair number in their sixties interestingly enough, not so much in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. And the important part of this is that it’s the leg pain signals that something’s going on in the back that’s pinching one of the nerves and is causing the leg pain. Commonly, this is called sciatica and Sciatica, sort of a poor term as it were because it just means leg pain and it doesn’t really tell you anything much about the diagnosis for the most part. But if somebody is having pain that radiates down to their front or their thigh back of their calf, then you start thinking of things that are pinching on nerve roots. The most common cause of that in an acute setting is actually a ruptured disc. Americans have been taught that ruptured discs account for everything. Perhaps even the satellites fallen out of the sky or the stock market going down. But the reality is, is that disc ruptures are in and of by themselves things that can cause no problems can cause big time problems, can cause a lot of leg pain and may cause some back pain as well. So the long and short of it is, is that again, we’re thinking of things that cause the leg pain. Other things can be cysts. They can be bone that’s overgrown, where the bone has gotten too tight and is squeezing things.