Lower Back Pain Causes and Treatments

Treatments for lower back pain vary depending on the cause. If you know the cause then you can find treatment options that will help relieve the pain. If however, you are not sure of the exact cause, it will be difficult to find the correct treatment option. So, let us take a quick look at some of the causes to see if we can find treatment solutions.

The First thing you should know is that excruciating lower back pain is commonly referred to as sciatica. Sciatica, or excruciating lower back pain, is caused by the irritation and inflammation, or compression of the spinal column, or both. The sciatic nerve, the longest nerve in the body is about the size of a nickel in diameter and starts at the lower back and goes all the way down to your toes.

As the nerve runs down the leg to the toes it branches off into smaller nerves all along the way, if at any point any part of the nerve becomes irritated, the lower back pain or sciatica will ensue. There are four major causes of sciatica as follows:

Nerve root compression

Herniated spinal discs

Spinal degeneration

Piriformis syndrome

The two most common being, Piriformis syndrome, and Nerve root compression. Piriformis syndrome, is when the Piriformis muscle is damaged and becomes inflamed, which causes swelling. The swollen muscle then causes pressure on the sciatic nerve, causing it to become inflamed thus, the lower back pain you are feeling. Nerve root compression occurs when the spinal column becomes compressed and pinches the roots of the sciatic nerve again, causing it to become inflamed.

In either case to get relief from the pain, (actually for any of the four things above) you should, when you first experience the pain, use ice packs to reduce the swelling that comes with the inflammation. If you use heat (as I did for many years) you will cause the inflammation to worsen which in turn, will causes more swelling and more pain. So, for the first 48 hours after first experiencing sciatica use an ice pack for twenty minutes once every two hours, this is to avoid skin damage, you should also place a cloth between the skin and ice pack as well.

Another thing you can do is backward extension exercises to help stretch the muscles that cause compression of the spinal cord. Some of the exercises, if done daily, can keep sciatica from returning, and they can be done in eight minutes, that is eight minutes a day for a pain free back.