What is Sciatica? Sciatica pain is a symptom of other issues, not the actual problem. It is an irritation or compression of the sciatic nerve, often caused by disc issues. Although there are a number of different issues that can cause sciatica. Sciatica is generally felt on just one side of the body and is […]
An article published in the July 3, 2014 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine caught my eye. A double-blind and randomized study was conducted in which patients with lumbar central spinal stenosis and moderate-to-severe leg pain and disability were given either epidural lidocaine injections or epidural injections with both lidocaine and steroids. [note: Randomized Double-Blind trials are the best, […]
Weight loss is perhaps the single most important contributor to long-term back pain relief. We rarely if ever see a patient with chronic low back pain of non-traumatic origin that is not significantly overweight, and we have literally never had a patient who lost a significant amount of weight report that their weight loss did […]
Virtually every patient, when confronted with back pain, will ask me the big question: “Why?” Unless the patient has experienced a trauma or demonstrates a disease on imaging (e.g., spinal stenosis, disc degeneration or degenerative disc disease, arthritis or degenerative joint disease, etc) the answer to the question “Why?” is challenging to definitively answer. Usually, […]
