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Herniated Disc, Health Channel

Herniated disc is very common and can happen to anyone, says Dr. Melissa Guanche, Physiatrist at Baptist Health Neuroscience Center.

The specialist explains that it doesn’t matter if you have a healthy lifestyle or if you are sedentary, a constant bad posture, for example, can cause this condition.

“Whether you are healthy and in shape, or sedentary, or have a physical job it can happen to everybody,” she adds.

Transcript

Herniated Disc, Health Channel

Doctor we were talking of course about that back pain and I want to be more specific in terms of something that’s very common herniated discs I know you’re standing next to the bio digital human can you walk us through us and tell us what happens I think that’s a healthy spine and then what occurs after. Absolutely Olga so first starting with the spine I want to demonstrate where are the discs so these are the bones into your spine in between every level you have a disc what I like to tell my patients is imagine the disc is like a jelly doughnut the center of your disc is soft and has a water component that outer portion of it is made up of fibers as you’ll see in the next slide the a herniated disc is when that jelly doughnut has compromised the outer edges you’ve actually squeezed that jelly doughnut and now some of that jelly has come out that’s painful and depending on where that jelly goes is where you’ll experience that pain. So let’s see if we can get that herniated disc and I believe it’s quite common it is in our population today more than ever regardless of age for that matter. Absolutely multiple reasons in terms of young athletes and kids kids are more active nowadays than they were in the past and we have more sedentary lifestyles so many people are just sitting behind a desk all day at work you know slouching and poor posture sitting at a desk predisposes you or puts the disc under unnatural pressure so this just predisposes you to herniate that disc so here’s the disc here’s the jelly imagine this is a doughnut this is your jelly this is your fiber abnormal pressures will cause some of this jelly like substance called the nucleus pulposus to come out to actually breach that outer fiber the most common place for that is to the back and to the side and we have a nerve that lives there so if this jelly touches your nerve you’re gonna get this pain going down your leg the jelly can also come to the center that might cause just back pain sometimes the jellies comes and just hangs out in the back portion of the disc so you may have a herniated disc but you may not have the leg symptoms this is so common I see this every single day in practice and whether you’re healthy and in shape or a sedentary or have a physical job I mean it really happens to anybody there’s things we can do to try to prevent it but even still it just happens all the time.

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