Sciatica Explained: Finding the Cause
1:30 · English captions
Dr. Nikolay Chernukhin discusses symptoms that travel down the leg, possible sources of nerve irritation, and why he starts by looking for the cause of a patient’s symptoms.
In this video
- Why symptoms that travel down the leg are part of the discussion.
- How Dr. Nikolay describes possible sources of nerve irritation.
- The hose analogy he uses to explain his approach to evaluation.
Explore sciatica at our clinics
Explore our Vancouver, WA clinic or Gresham, OR clinic.
Video transcript
But the thing that most people don't realize is that sciatica can happen for so many different reasons. Today I want to talk about sciatica, a very common symptom, frequently occurring. People come in with sciatica and they say, "I got sciatica."
Generally speaking, in order to have sciatica, you need symptoms that go down the leg. What's not easy to find is what's causing it. Think about it like this.
There's a nerve that goes down from your low back all the way down to your leg. And if that nerve gets pinched anywhere between the joints, discs or the muscles, if anything pinches it, it can cause symptoms down the leg.
And if that wasn't complicated enough, the crazy thing is that sometimes it can be pinched in multiple places.
Think about a water hose. If there's water going through the hose and you pinch it in one place, water decreases. Pinch it in two places, water decreases further. The way it works in our nerves:
essentially, it becomes a threshold. Meaning that the pressure in itself, sometimes isn't enough to cause symptoms. But if you compromise it in a few places, it reaches that threshold, and you start getting radiating symptoms.
So what one must do is find... Go through the nerve pathway and trace it. Find what is tight and release it.