Sciatica is a description of a symptom. It means that you have neurological symptoms related to the sciatic nerve in your back. The sciatic nerve goes from your spine into your buttocks and the back of your thigh. Sciatica treatment can focus on the pain, or the underlying conditions that lead-up to the sciatica in the first place. The treatment focus is usually one or the other, but not both.
Our sciatica treatment in Beverly Hills starts with an evaluation. We often see multiple causative factors for why sciatica is there in the first place. Sometimes sciatica doctors overlook those factors.
The underlying conditions that eventually cause your sciatica precede the symptoms that you feel. Subsequent malfunctions in your spine and elsewhere set-up the unique, numerous compensations your body uses to minimize sciatic nerve irritation. Compensations may include: pelvic torque, inflammation, vertebral shift, muscular imbalance, brain function compensations, or a shift in muscle tone. Triggers could fall into the categories of allergic responses, or emotional stress causing musculoskeletal changes.
Unfortunately, few sciatica specialists evaluate all these compensations affecting your spine and nervous system at the core of your sciatica.
Conventional Sciatica Specialists
Conventional sciatica specialists treat the symptom. They may try to numb it, cut around it with sciatica surgery, or block it with some powerful chemical agents. They may use nerve block injections such as an epidural (putting a needle into your spine to deliver the medicine). These are some of the sciatica treatments.
None of the doctors administering those sciatica treatments do anything about the underlying compensations that started before the pain. Why not? Because it doesn’t change their treatment of sciatica. So, unfortunately, that which brought about your sciatica in the first place is not even considered in conventional treatment. You could get some immediate relief from their quick-fix, invasive sciatica treatments. However, there is never a guarantee that the relief from those quick fixes will ever be permanent.
The reason your sciatica might come back is because unresolved underlying conditions are likely still present after the treatment. Your body responds to those conditions with the same compensations you had before the sciatica treatment. It’s the compensations that cause the conditions leading to sciatica. If they aren’t addressed, wouldn’t they likely come back?
Sciatica Treatment Options
If you don’t want to go the narcotic/opioid/surgical-procedure route, then listen up. The core of your condition—your unique altered physiology which caused your sciatica in the first place—must be investigated. Otherwise, sciatica treatment will only be for relatively temporary relief. Our model of treatment is not meant to kill pain, but to correct function. Our focus is to undo the reasons your sciatica came about in the first place.
You have options. If you want the epidural first, read every word of the “informed consent” document you sign before the surgical procedure. What is the risk from that epidural procedure?
Our investigation into the causes of your sciatica will reveal those things holding back your own healing potential. It’s safe and gentle, just what you need for lasting pain relief.
Last Resort for Sciatica Treatment Before Surgery
Do you have sciatica for more than 3 months? Have you already tried steroids, for weeks at a time, narcotic drugs like Vicodin, addictive opioid drugs like Oxycontin? Are you going to give the “chiropractor/natural medicine” a “try” as your last hope before an epidural or surgery?
First, let’s make sure you’re thinking clearly. If you think you will get immediate pain relief after 2 visits to a chiropractor, I’ve got news for you: It doesn’t work that easily. You’re mixing-up 2 ideas. One is your attempt to kill pain with powerful chemical drugs. The other is the process of rebuilding your body at the chiropractor’s. Those are completely different paths to take. One is an event, the other is a process. For the chiropractor to remove your body’s dysfunctional compensations accumulating over months or years, is a step by step process. To get your body normally functioning again, it’s never going to be a quick fix.
Your body is currently using a lot of effort to stop you in your tracks. It wants to remain unchanged. It’s trying to survive by not letting you do anything, and right now it is winning, by stopping your movement. Undoing all that is very different than temporarily cutting off the pain. Consider all the time you’ve already tried taking Prednisone and Vicodin. They were supposed to be quick fixes, but they didn’t help you! You can not put a 2 visit time limit on the chiropractor.
Only if you really want to get better
Would you quit after 2 visits because of a personal narrative that you want others to believe? So that you could say “see, I’ve done everything. I even went to the chiropractor.” I hope that’s not your plan. You would have not followed the chiropractor’s advice. It would be as if you never honestly “tried the chiropractor,” because you didn’t even follow his directions. 2 visits is a plan for failure. If this is what you would plan to do, don’t call my office. You cannot expect a 2 day cure. It is unrealistic, irrational and it is a total waste of the chiropractor’s effort. By doing this, you would outsmart your own chance of healing and sabotage your own chance for recovery.
The key is the right integrative chiropractor to unblock your healing potential. Call us to experience our powerful method. Allow your own healing potential to re-ignite within you, and set you free of pain.