Back Pain: Herniated Disk Explained - Health Channel

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Back Pain: Herniated Disk Explained |

Dr. Theresa Pazionis, Orthopedic & Spine Surgeon with Miami Cancer Institute, explains with a 3D imaging what a herniated disk is.
The doctor describes a herniated disk can cause severe pain, weakness and numbness of lower extremities.
If arthritis appears, it can cause pain from the herniated disc and from bones compressing the area, she explains.

Transcript


But what are the chances it could be from a herniated disc so we have an image here a 3d image and a love for you explain to us what a herniated disc is and okay what are we looking at here specifically sure so as we see there it’s actually really nice graphic so I go over and I point to this now okay very good oh I sit down and I point to this okay lovely umm there’s many different things going on yes in terms of okay so here we have the nucleus pulposus you can see the purple in the middle of the screen mm-hmm and then there’s the gray which is the annulus fibrosus so basically the annulus is sort of the the doughnut and the nucleus pulposus is more than jelly okay head as it were so essentially as the jelly gets compressed out of the doughnut what it does is it pushes on the nerve root okay so it’ll pay if I’m thinking about a doughnut right yeah I don’t have too delightful so but this is like a less delicious and more painful drive more painful so painful Donuts so essentially you see the yellow there and that’s the nerve root and you can see how the red flashing light denotes the area where the nerve is compressed okay so that can cause pain or in in the extreme that cause numbness or weakness in your leg and that’s when we really should consider operative intervention now as you can also see above there there’s something that looks like a little hat that’s your spinous process your Fassett joints and the bone that’s surrounding your spinal canal if we get our thright us there that can actually hypertrophy or grow and then we’re going to present with pain that’s actually both from the herniated disc and from bone that’s compressing the area so there can be multifactorial reasons for that nerve pain compressed so the acute discrimination or something called foraminal stenosis or spinal stenosis okay where your spine self narrows because of arthritis or other factors you

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