Sciatica Treatment At Home

Sciatica Treatment methods that are promoted online are often presented as the “one and only cure” for sciatica.  Many of these methods are fine to use, but anyone who is promoting a single cure for sciatica is simply missing the big picture.

Because most of the individuals in the online sciatica treatment market are not health care professionals, they lack the training and experience to know that there are several different causes for sciatica symptoms.  Typically, these individuals have discovered something that worked for them when other things had failed.  Because their experience is limited to what worked for them, they don’t realize that what worked for them  may not work for everyone and may even make some people WORSE!

As a practicing doctor of chiropractic with 20 plus years of clinical experience and having treated hundreds of sciatica cases, I can tell you that the first step in finding an effective sciatica treatment that works for you is to try to determine the cause of your particular symptoms.  The majority of sciatica cases fall into one (and sometimes both) of two categories:

• Nerve Compression (most often from a herniated or ruptured disc)
• Muscular Contraction (most often of the piriformis and/or gluteus minimus muscles)

Most of the sciatica home treatment products you’ll find online are primarily for sciatica due to muscular contraction.  There’s nothing wrong with these products and they can be effective – IF your sciatica is actually due to muscle contraction and NOT nerve compression!

But, if you are trying to do sciatica treatment at home and you’re using methods that address the wrong cause, not only will your efforts be ineffective, they may actually increase your symptoms.

For example, I have seen some individuals recommending the “downward dog” yoga position as a sciatica treatment exercise.  This will usually help when the sciatica symptoms are caused by muscle contraction in the buttock area, but unfortunately, the forward bending of the spine (particularly if your form is not perfect, and chances are it may not be simply because you’re in pain) will tend to make bulging discs bulge even more, and cause increased nerve compression and pain.

As I said before, effective sciatica treatment at home begins with attempting to determine the cause of your sciatica symptoms.

The video above goes into more detail, but there are a couple of basic tests you can use.

The first thing to check for  is for signs of “nerve root tension”, which indicates that nerve compression and irritation are involved in your sciatica.  The straight leg raise shown below is a simple test to detect nerve root tension:

An increase in your sciatica symptoms when straightening the leg as shown above  is usually a sign that one or more of the nerve roots that form the sciatic nerve are being compressed and irritated – and suggests that your sciatica treatment should focus on nerve compression techniques more than muscle contraction treatments.

A test for the most common muscular cause of sciatica is to place tension on the piriformis muscle as shown below:

 An increase or decrease in sciatica symptoms with placing tension on the piriformis is suggestive that muscle contraction is the primary source of your problem and suggests that your home sciatica treatment regimen focus on releasing overly tight muscles.

Now that you have a better idea of what may be causing your sciatica, you are ready to move on to the next video in the series that discusses how to get started with sciatica  treatment.  To continue on to the next video, please enter your email in the box below, or at the top of this page next to the video.