Can Physical Therapy Help Resolve My Recurrent Sciatica for Good?

Sciatica is a singular discomfort as the smallest movement can lead to shooting pain in your lower back that extends down into your legs. While one go-around with this condition is more than enough, you’ve developed recurrent sciatica and you just want to put an end to the merry-go-round of lower back pain.

While there are many ways in which we can bring you immediate relief from sciatica pain, the best strategy for long-term results is targeted physical therapy.

Both Dr. Naveen Reddy and Dr. Maziar Massrour have extensive experience in relieving the hard-to-ignore symptoms that accompany sciatica. At Apex Pain Specialists, we offer a wide range of pain management tools that can tackle this type of low back pain.

For people with recurrent sciatica, however, we also highly recommend a more sustainable approach through physical therapy, which can go a long way toward putting an end to the cyclical discomfort. Let’s take a look.

Sciatica basics

To better understand why physical therapy (PT) can be so beneficial for recurrent sciatica, it’s helpful to review what you’re up against.

Your sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in your body and it starts in your lower back and then splits and travels down each side of your buttocks and into your legs.

With sciatica, which affects up to 40% of people in the United States at some point in their lives, something pinches or irritates the nerve. As a result of this nerve compression, symptoms can develop locally and also travel down the length of the nerve, which is why so many people develop symptoms that shoot down into one leg.

While the pain certainly grabs your attention, symptoms can also come in the form of numbness, tingling, and muscle weakness.

This something that pinches the sciatic nerve can be a herniated disc, degenerative disc disease, arthritis, spinal stenosis, and other wear-and-tear conditions in the spine. If you consider that degenerative disc disease alone is found in 90% of people aged 60 and older, it’s little wonder that sciatica is so prevalent and recurrent.

The power of physical therapy for sciatica

As we mentioned, we’re armed with some effective tools for relieving your sciatica symptoms, but if the condition keeps recurring, it’s a very good idea to add PT to your treatment arsenal.

Your spine is made of bony vertebrae and soft discs that come together to form the foundational support for your back. But your back is also supported by some potentially strong muscles that can take much of the pressure off of your spine, if you let them.

That is the primary goal of PT when it comes to recurrent sciatica, to beef up the core muscles in the trunk of your body to relieve current and future nerve compression.

Your core muscles are those muscles that attach to your spine and pelvis, and they work together to stabilize your body and spine. These muscles include your:

• Abdominal muscle groups
• Obliques
• Pelvic floor
• Hip flexors
• Back muscles, such as your erector spinae and multifidus

During PT, you learn strength and stretching exercises that work each of these muscle groups, separately and together. In doing this, you can better support your spine and slow down degenerative conditions that are compressing your spine and herniating your discs, both of which are direct paths to sciatica.

Through PT, you can not only relieve your symptoms of sciatica, but also address the underlying problem that’s causing the condition to return time and again. In other words, PT is a healing approach to sciatica rather than an interventional one that only manages your symptoms.

While we can’t guarantee that PT will resolve your sciatica for good, we can say it’s a solid step toward that goal. 

To learn more about the amazing benefits of PT for treating recurrent sciatica, please call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 or book an appointment online today.