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Dr. Raizadeh shares three tips to prevent sciatica.
Dr. Raiszadeh:
Ladies, I have three great tips to prevent sciatica. Again, sciatica is the pain when you have that runs down your leg. So what is the cause of that pain? The cause of that pain in short is a disc that has come out of its normal alignment and is pressing on one of the nerves.
So what do we do to prevent sciatica? Well, first and foremost, before I give you the tips I must tell you again that these resolve on their own. It’s 90 percent of the time the disc gets smaller, and they resolve on their own. But what do you do to prevent these symptoms?
Number one, you have to maintain good alignment and posture. The posture is key. If you walk down, and we see a lot of laboring individuals who work down and shoveling and bending and jack hammering; these people are in an unfavorable alignment, are put in an unfavorable alignment in their spine, and that allows the disc to pop out.
So number one is posture. You’ve got to make sure if any position you are, keep your posture upright and your back straight–number one, and number two, you again have to make sure your core muscles are strong. The core muscle is what protects your spine. So if you didn’t have the muscles in your belly, if you didn’t have the muscles in the back, every day you take a step, every day you do your activities, what’s going to happen is that force goes directly to your spine. So in addition to the posture you have to make sure that you keep your back muscles strong.
Now third thing that’s very important is you have to be very sensible in what sort of activities that you do. So for example, if you were picking up your briefcase from the car and putting it in, and it’s a heavy briefcase, put your back in an alignment that will allow you to pick up that briefcase from the car to take it to the house. That means bend with your knees, don’t bend everything with your back. Use the support of your knees, your thighs, your upper extremity, as compared to just bending your whole body and lifting something up.
Sensibility is a huge part of this, is to prevent problems. You can’t say that, “Oh, I can do this. I know I have done it a million times,” and as we get more mature in life, it’s easier to get injured and it’s much harder to recover from it.
So you have to make sure that if you are going to lift something, if you are going to lift anything, lift at your office work, lift your baby, lift… whatever it is, the groceries or your shopping, make sure you are doing with your arms, make sure you are doing it with your legs, not as much with your back and keep in a favorable position. This will allow you to hopefully prevent any sort of these symptoms.
About Dr. Raiszadeh, M.D.:
Board certified by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, Dr. Ramin Raiszadeh is an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in the complex field of adult spinal surgery. He earned his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he received the Paul Harrington Award for Research. He also completed a specialized internship and residency program at Baylor before achieving the highest level of medical education and fellowship training at the University of Texas Medical School. During this fellowship, under the directorship of multiple neurosurgeons and orthopedic spine surgeons, he became skilled in treating all forms of pediatric and adult spinal conditions.