Symptoms of Sciatica - Health Channel

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Symptoms of Sciatica |

Dr. Jose Mena, Interventional Spine Specialist with Miami Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Institute, explains sciatica means there is a compression of a nerve in the lower back, and normally people will feel it down in the leg.

“You might feel a jolt of pain going on the leg and depending on which nerve is being affected, you might feel it in a specific distribution running on leg,” he says.

Transcript

Tell us what we’re seeing here and focus in on those areas that you just talked about that we need to discuss. > So what we have over here, here’s the spine looking from the from the back view so we have the different segments in here and the spine, those are called the bones or the vertebra. So in between the bones we have certain structures that we call the disk so basically that entails the lower back and between some structures over here we have the nerve, it… eventually essentially what sciatica means is that there’s a compression of a nerve in here in your lower back and actually you might be feeling down that in the in in the buttock or in the leg. So that’s basically what the sciatica entails, so it’s normally a problem up here that normally people will feel it down in the leg. > So when we’re getting to the leg I mean you’ve looked at the spine right there so what is that pain though that then shoots all the way down at the leg I would guess that that then is attacking the nerves the muscles what are we talking about. > Basically that would be a nerf essentially this is a little more of a close-up view here so we have a better close-up of what we were seeing before, so we have the bones and here in between we have the disc and here this jello structures are called nerves so normally when there’s a nerve that is being compressed you might feel the symptoms going on the leg it’s basically we’re electricians, so we might have although you may have a problem in your lower back you might feel a jolt of pain going on the leg and depending on which nerve is being affected you might feel it in a specific distribution running on leg either in the side of the leg, back of the leg, front alike, it depends and normally those patient and the patient we having complains of having numbness and tingling for the most part along with it, sometimes if it’s severe enough they can they can have weakness.

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