[quote]PowerCrazy wrote:
i find it funny that people keep telling me to stop trying to fix it myself and get the surgery (DOCTORS) and people who say your not a doctor so you cant do it (FAMILY)
i read through all 5 pages of that thread by the way and its hard to understand what could apply to me and what doesnt as you have answered like 30 million peoples questions
:([/quote]
I’m going to be totally honest here about surgery.
Earlier in the thread, I mentioned that 1 in 10 of the surgery subjects achieved better pain reduction. Not very good odds. And the surgery group had greater risk of subsequent instability and the pain and inflammation that accompany that problem over time. Also, very few subjects (1 in 10?) ever achieved complete pain relief. To the doctors, partial pain relief is a successful outcome, even if strength and function are compromised.
However, surgery WAS especially effective for sciatica, more so than for just back pain. But the subjects who got their sciatica fixed experienced more back pain LATER ON.
Often, the link between pain and the mechanical damage that can be seen on MRI is unclear. For example, there might be bulges where there is no pain, or vice versa. Or there might be damage with pain symptoms that seem completely unrelated to the damage.
However, in your case, you have a diagnosis of a bulge at L5-S1 and symptoms that fit the dermatome of that nerve root. So there is a clear link between your disc bulge and your pain. (Google Image search “dermatome” and look at the map for L5 and S1). Therefore, there is a good chance that if you have surgery to get rid of that bulge, you could get fast relief of the pain of sciatica.
However, then you would have permanently reduced disc height, possible issues with instability, and greater risk of future back pain.
Maybe you could reduce those risks with proper rehab after surgery. But, if proper rehab after surgery is critical for a good long-term outcome, why not try proper rehab BEFORE trying surgery, given the risks of the surgery?
Besides, cutting out the bulge is not the only way of getting rid of it. What is causing the bulge in the first place? The forces that are acting on your spine. And those come from your posture, movements, and loading patterns.
My reasoning about my own sciatica was that some posture, movement, or load on my spine was squeezing the (previously-injured) L5-S1 disc such that it was bulging enough to press on the nerve root. The trigger posture for my first bout of sciatica seemed to be sitting in a horribly non-ergonomic airplane seat for 8 straight hours without standing up or moving around. I reasoned that I need to squeeze that disc in the opposite direction or back into place. I flipped through my library of stuff looking for what might do this. I thought that 2 positions from Egoscue would help, static back and floor block. Static back, especially with an ice pack, is about the best thing for acute pain relief anyway. The floor block position should help push those lumbar discs back where they belong. It should do the opposite of what sitting does.
Those positions helped immediately.
At the same time, I found the “somatics” stuff and tried a few of the movement sequences. Muscles in spasm immediately relaxed with these weird little movement sequences. So that was my final piece of the puzzle for sciatica relief.
I believe that the somatics movements are so effective because they activate the deeper smaller stabilizers of the spine in a fully supported position (lying on your back), and convince the CNS to let the larger muscles in spasm (QL, piriformis) relax.
So, it is NOT TRUE that only a doctor can fix your sciatica. A good surgeon MAY be able to alleviate your sciatica through surgery. But he cannot make your back function properly, and will probably make its function even worse than it is now.
