Is That Shooting Pain in Your Lower Back Sciatica?

Moving around has become challenging because certain positions and movements bring on stabbing pain that shoots from your lower back, down through your buttock, and perhaps into your leg. 

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good chance you’re dealing with sciatica, which affects up to 40% of people.

At Revive Spine & Pain Center, our team counts spine health and lower back pain among our top specialties, which means we have plenty of experience helping patients to navigate sciatica. 

So if you're dealing with shooting pain in your lower back, it’s very much worth reading up on sciatica.

Your sciatic nerve

Your sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in your body — about a half inch at its widest — and is formed by five nerve roots in your lower back. This nerve starts in your lower back and splits to travel down each of your legs, all the way down to your feet. 

The primary role of the large nerve is to connect the skin and muscles of your legs to your spinal cord, which is made abundantly clear when you have sciatica.

When sciatica strikes

When you have sciatica, something is compressing the nerve, which can lead to symptoms that include:

• Pain
• Numbness
• Tingling
• Weakness
• Inability to stand up straight

These symptoms can stay local in your lower back, or they can travel down one side of your lower extremities. 

When you feel pain (or numbness and tingling) radiate into other areas, this is what really indicates that your sciatic nerve is irritated, as symptoms follow the nerve’s path down the back of your leg. In some cases, the pain can stop in the buttocks, or the symptoms might travel into your thigh and lower leg.

And these symptoms can flare with certain movements or positions, such as getting up from a seated position or bending down to pick something up.

The road to sciatica

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the telltale signs of sciatica, let’s take a look at how you might have gotten there. 

In 90% of cases, sciatica is due to herniation in one of your lumbar discs, a condition in which some of the disc escapes its vertebral space and irritates surrounding nerve fibers. Less commonly, sciatica occurs due to arthritis, stenosis, injury, and other spine conditions.

Since disc issues are the leading culprits behind sciatica, we’re going to focus on some factors that can place you more at risk for disc herniations, including:

• Carrying excess pounds
• Lack of core strength
• Standing or sitting for long periods
• Heavy lifting
• Poor posture
• Having diabetes
• Involvement in a motor vehicle accident

Each of these risk factors places added wear-and-tear on your discs, which makes them more vulnerable to bulging and herniation.

Sciatica solutions

If you’re still reading this, it likely means you suspect you have sciatica and now you want to know about relief. The good news is that we offer plenty of nonsurgical options, including:

• Rest
• Medications
• Nerve blocks
• Epidural steroid injections
• Radiofrequency ablation
• Platelet-rich plasma injections
• Physical therapy
• Acupuncture

If these conservative measures prove unsuccessful and your sciatica fails to get better, we can  get more aggressive with spinal cord stimulation and a minimally invasive lumbar decompression (MILD) to open up the space that’s compressing your nerve. 

To get on the road to relief from sciatica, your first step is to make an appointment at one of our New Jersey locations in Marlton, Hamilton Township, Northfield, or East Brunswick.