Trust me, a pinched nerve in your lower back is a problem you don’t want. A pinched nerve can cause debilitating, chronic pain and a serious decline in physical functionality. The ability to do normal, everyday activities is impacted and your quality of life is diminished. Unfortunately, a pinched nerve in the lower back can occur for a variety of reasons and hard to ascertain. It can be caused by a narrowing of the spinal tunnels that the nerves travel through, bulging or herniated discs, or as an effect facet-joint arthritis.
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Regardless of the root cause, a pinched lumbar nerve occurs when the nerve in your lower back is subjected to pressure from the surrounding bones, cartilage, muscles or tendons. This pressure causes pain, numbness or tingling anywhere along the path that the nerve branch supplies. This is why many times pain won’t even occur in the lower back. For example, if a herniated disk in your lower back starts to put too much pressure on a nerve root, you might feel like your foot is asleep or experience radiating pain down the back of your leg. It’s easy to see why it’s critically important to treat the pinched nerve AND to identify and treat the root cause of the pinched nerve.
The traditional diagnosis process is a physical examination. You lay down on your back. You lift your leg and hold it out straight. Then the imaging tests of your neck and back. Maybe some tests to check nerve function. Then they open up your back and fuse your spine with a bunch of metals and screws. Problem solved. Or is it? The problem with any invasive lumbar surgery is that the structure never fully functions like it originally did. Oh yeah — don’t forget the lengthy recovery times, continuing pain post-surgery and symptoms that begin to emerge in other parts of the body.
So let’s look at this from a different angle (excuse the pun). What if we examined the musculoskeletal system as a whole unit, rather than in parts and pieces? After all, the body is one machine. There really is no such thing as a hip or a knee or a spine — these are simply specialized parts of the whole machine. Furthermore, since the nerves that tell every muscle how to move each joint live in the spine, it stands to reason that anything impacting these nerves could and should impact a joint.
That is why a newer, more favorable approach is to examine the full musculoskeletal system holistically to determine the source of the pain, as well as the pinched nerve. Then an optimal treatment plan can be developed which will address the entire body and take into consideration the impact the treatment will have on other parts of your anatomy. An example of such a plan could be precise fluoroscopic, ultrasound-guided injections of healing growth factors isolated from a patient’s own blood platelets, PRP, or stem cells, thus regenerating and strengthening a body’s tissues, rather than removing them and potentially causing additional pain and limited functionality. One thing is for certain: the differences between traditional spine surgery and the regenerative approach are stark. But when it comes to conditions like pinched nerves in the lower back, maybe it’s time to consider looking at things from a higher altitude.
