Sports Doctor: Back Pain - discovering the cause

Nov 3 2011 By David Jenkins

RELEVANT exercises are an important part of successful sciatica treatment.

But it is necessary to determine the most likely cause(s) of your condition in order to know which exercises are most likely to benefit you - and not make things worse.

The reality is that sciatica and sciatica-like symptoms are caused by different things in different people.

When an individual finds an exercise or treatment that helps their sciatica when nothing else did, it's understandable they might think they had found a uniquely effective sciatica treatment.

What they fail to realise though is that no treatment works for everyone.

Sciatica exercises don't have to be complicated or difficult to do. The trickiest part is figuring out what the cause of your sciatica is, so you can then use the appropriate exercises and treatments to address that cause.

So, how do you figure out the cause of your sciatica? Well, some clues can be found in the history of how your sciatica symptoms developed.

Nerve compression sciatica is often caused by some type of injury to one or more of the discs and inflammation. This type of problem is often a result of a trauma. If you have sciatica caused by this problem, muscle-based sciatica exercises will not help, and may irritate the nerves!

For more information check out www.sportstherapyscotland.co.uk