You’ve suffered long enough from sciatica. Taking pain relievers only provides temporary relief. You’ve tried them all: Aleve, Advil, Motrin, and maybe even considered taking some of the stronger prescribed medications to no avail.

You’ve been avoiding your favorite exercises or other routine daily activities like lifting your kids or driving a car out of fear of flaring up the pain again. You might have even tried physical therapy, seen an orthopedist, or consulted with a spine surgeon and yet you still feel lost about what to do.

You are not alone. Sciatica is an aggravating ailment that commonly plagues most people at some point in their lives. Chiropractic treatment for sciatica has a long history of success.

Here’s one of the most important things you need to know about sciatica: It’s a symptom, not a diagnosis. It’s leg pain that can be caused by a variety of problems, including a bulging disc, a compressed joint, or a tight piriformis muscle. The condition itself is a compressed sciatic nerve—the largest and longest nerve in the body. The sciatic nerve runs from the lower back, then branches off down both legs to the feet.

Chiropractic treatment can relieve sciatica pain, no matter the cause.

At Urban Wellness Clinic, we use a variety of chiropractic techniques, massage, and physical rehabilitation techniques for sciatica relief:

• Chiropractic adjustments: Adjustments are one of the most common methods used by chiropractors for treatment of sciatica. During an adjustment, your chiropractor will manually manipulate the spine. This can help immediately relieve pain and alleviate pressure caused by dislocated spinal joints.
• Neurokinetic Therapy: We know that 50% of people that have sciatica from a disc herniation have no pain, so when someone walks into our office, we want to go one step further and understand WHY the disc is getting compressed. Is there some “energy leak” or area of instability such that the disc is compressing to help stabilize? It’s a great strategy in a dysfunctional system. Our goal is to figure out which muscles are not firing, and get them working again, to take pressure off the disc.
• Mckenzie Method: In acute disc herniation cases, we will go through a Mckenzie protocol to drive the pressure of the disc forward to help suck the jelly disc material back into the disc. This usually involves repetitive extension-based exercises.
  Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS): Once someone is out of the acute phase, we rehabilitate with DNS principles, basically how we learned movement patterns as infants in our first year of life, to get our patients moving better with true core stability.

The visit will begin with a comprehensive discussion, gathering data about where the condition may have started, to properly diagnose and find the best course of treatment for your SPECIFIC case and body patterns.

A recent case that presented to the clinic was a 46 year old male with right sided leg pain that traveled to the calf and foot. He noticed it after going snowboarding. After orthopedic tests, the cause of the pain was found to be a lumbar disc herniation at level L5/S1, which was compressing the sciatic nerve. Particular exercises were given in the office as well as specific lumbar adjustments. NKT testing found an overworking piriformis muscle for an inhibited glute max.

Specific soft tissue release using Active Release Technique was used to treat the piriformis and tight muscles along the pathway of the L5/S1 nerve root. The patient felt immediate relief after his first visit and continued to improve over the next 6 visits, in which time the leg pain was gone and he was back to doing the things he loves like running and swimming.

We are dedicated to finding the root cause of your sciatica.

Urban Wellness Clinic Can Ease Your Pain

With chiropractic care, you’ll find sciatic pain relief fairly quickly, but there is more to the clinical picture! We perform full assessments to find the cause of your sciatica, perform chiropractic techniques and specific soft tissue release to ease your pain and teach you stretches and exercises to create stability and strength for continued relief and prevention of flare-ups.

While symptoms may lessen in intensity almost immediately, the nerve itself usually takes about 6 to 12 weeks to heal.

If you have back pain, contact us today. Call us at 212-355-0445 or email us at hello@urbanwellnessclinic.com. We’re here for you!

Best in health,
Dr. Emily Kiberd