At Performance Spine and Sports Medicine, a non-surgical orthopedic institute in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, the specialists use a team-oriented, interdisciplinary approach to treating back pain. Here, they explain how back pain is caused by the domino effect of a herniated disc in the spine, and offer non-surgical treatments.
There are many confusing messages out there about the best treatments for back pain. Patients find themselves going from doctor to doctor, and one therapy program to another, trying to find an answer — with little to no result. Worse yet, some patients opt for surgery that ends up in devastating results, with even worse back pain than before.
In order to understand our multi-step non-surgical treatment, let’s first talk about how some back pain can be caused by the domino effect of a herniated disc in the spine. Discs are the cushions between the bony parts of the spine, and a herniated disc presses on your nerves. A person can get a herniated disc because of bad posture or spinal misalignment, as well as weakened muscles that fail to support the spine. The herniated disc can get worse over time and start to press on or irritate nerves that come out of the spine, nerves that control the muscles in your arms and legs. It can be a result of a crooked back, which makes back pain worse because one part of the spine is getting more pressure from your bodyweight than others.
One of these nerves is the sciatic nerve. It is the longest nerve in the body, coming from the lower spine, going down into the leg, and branching into the foot. If the herniated disc is in the lower back and irritates the sciatic nerve, the result can be something called sciatica. Not all leg pain is sciatica, but most sciatica involves leg pain. Patients often describe the resulting pain as toothache-like, a sharp stabbing, or “electric shocks” going down the leg or foot. Sometimes the leg gets cramps or weird sensations of something crawling with “pins and needles” up and down it.
As the herniated disc worsens over time, it becomes more and more inflamed and sends out chemicals that further irritate the nerve, and muscle spasms worsen in the back and leg. If the pain is not treated aggressively and early enough, the body becomes even more sensitive to it and your brain starts to focus and tune into pain even more over time. The pain becomes even harder to treat! For many patients, it starts to interfere with work, daily life, and sometimes cause depression. The secret to treating back pain is to stop this devastatingly painful chain of events. Our revolutionary, multi-pronged approach is like having multiple armies that are coordinated to do one thing: stop back pain and keep it away.
The standard of calculating nerve damage from a pinched nerve or sciatica is a special nerve test for back pain called Electromyography (EMG). An MRI will only tell you how the spine looks, but it cannot tell you how bad the nerve damage is. We take digital X-rays and do EMG in-house, in our state-of-the-art, 5,000-square-foot facility.
There are many non-surgical options for our patients, including a machine that relieves pressure off the nerve called the DRX MACHINE (Non-Surgical Spinal Decompression), used as part of our multi-pronged back pain treatment system. The DRX9000 specifically targets an individual disc, relieving pressure on the pain-producing nerve. It repositions the disc and rehydrates it, allowing water, oxygen, and nutrients to be absorbed.
Other non-surgical techniques include epidural injections and acupuncture.
For more, see this video from the Performance Spine and Medicine Institute.
The information in the article is not intended to substitute for the medical expertise and advice of your healthcare provider. We encourage you to discuss any decisions about treatment or care with an appropriate healthcare provider.
