When sciatica first hits, our physical therapy patients always start their 1st visit with the same question:
What Caused My Sciatica?
It can be very difficult to figure out how back pain started. In general, there are many medical issues that can lead to back pain and significant sciatica issues. That being said, there are 3 common causes of back pain.
We usually try to highlight one patient a week, but with so many amazing results, there just doesn’t seem to be enough weeks! We’d like to thank all of our physical therapy patients for taking the time out to give us a good word on social media and the internet, and for taking the time out to tell us how we’re doing!
Sciatica is one of the most common back ailments that we see in our Elizabeth and Jersey City physical therapy clinics today. The symptoms, originating in the lower back, manifesting itself as pain, numbness, or tingling that travel down the sciatic nerve of each leg, can be both disheartening and difficult to handle, affecting numerous aspects of a person’s daily life.
It can be hard enough to deal with pain in one body part, let along multiple body parts. For Ada, who already deals with back pain issues stemming from a lifelong back condition, she knew that she needed to come in to physical therapy in the Jersey City clinic when she now started to have migraines due to neck pain as well. As a former patient, she knew that Humberto and Dr. James could help her again.
A basic fact of life is that we all live extremely busy lives. From work, to family, and everything in between, there is always something that needs to be done. With that time crunch, our experience with our patients is that our health usually takes a back seat, because we always think, “I’ll deal with that tomorrow.” But there are just some things that shouldn’t wait until tomorrow, especially when dealing with back pain.
Low back pain patients who underwent early physical therapy reportedly had better outcomes than those who did not. Early physical therapy was also more cost-effective, according to researchers.
In the study, published recently in the journal Spine, researchers studied the effect of early physical therapy on 220 patients with low back pain, with respect to both outcomes and costs.
When a patient comes in for sciatica physical therapy in the Elizabeth or Jersey City clinics, we always give each patient a personalized home exercise program. Numerous studies show that physical therapy in conjunction with a consistent home exercise program has the best results with getting rid of sciatica pain. But many patients often have the same, burning questions:
How often should I do my exercises? And do I need to do them forever?
It goes without saying that we LOVE all of our ROCKSTAR physical therapy patients in Elizabeth and Jersey City. We try as hard as possible to build a comfortable little community in our physical therapy clinics, where patients can not only feel great after seeing us, but also feel great when they’re in the clinic as well!
When it comes to back pain, I always let my physical therapy patients know that treatment may be an ongoing thing. We can always help you get back from injury, but once you get back out on your own, there is always a chance for re-injury, which means you may need to come back for physical therapy.
With the latest nor’easter having finished ripping through our area, dropping 12 inches of snow, the time has come to start the dig out process. But with that comes the potential for back pain due to improper snow shoveling techniques.
