You Are Diagnosed With a Lumbar Herniated Disc With Sciatica, What Next?

If you are diagnosed with sciatica from a lumbar herniated disc, you are not alone. At any one point in time, at least 1% of the population is having the same issue. What to do next?

Having burning pain along with pins and needles down your leg is unsettling, painful, and disruptive. The key is to achieve pain relief without undergoing surgery. Surgery has small but real risks for a disc herniation, one risk is that of recurrence at the same level (10%). You want to achieve pain relief while your body takes care of disintegrating the piece of disc that has ended up where it's not supposed to be.

The options of what to do once you are diagnosed with a herniated disc involves the following:

1. Initial Acute Pain relief. This may occur from medication.The medication may be in the form of a Medrol Dose Pak, which is a burst of Prednisone for a few days and then tapering off to prevent adrenal problems. The Prednisone acts as a hefty anti-inflammatory agent which often decreases the sciatica pain dramatically. Another medication that can be extremely helpful is Lyrica, which is a neuropathic pain medication that can relieve the pain coming from the pinched nerve. Narcotic pain medications and muscle relaxers have their place in the management of pain from a herniated disc. These medications should only be received from one physician and care should be taken not to go over the prescribed dosage.


2. Mid-term Pain Relief. Physical therapy, Chiropractic Treatment, Acupuncture, Spinal Decompression, and Interventional Pain Treatments have all been shown to help significantly for sciatica pain. This may occur singly or with combination treatments. These treatments may help immediately upon treatment commencing or after a week of trying the Medrol Dose Pak. The only one of these treatments that has shown any evidence of having the disc herniation shift back inside the confines of the disc space is Spinal Decompression. This may occur for a small herniation, but it will not happen for a substantial piece of disc.


3. Long Term Pain Relief. With a herniated disk, the treatments above may do the trick for pain relief with avoiding surgery. If the pain goes away for a while from epidural injections and spinal decompression for instance, then returns 3 months later, the treatments can be repeated. Having a series of injections every few months is a small price to pay to avoid surgery and the complication profile with injections is rare. The cost of spinal decompression is less than 5% of the cost of spinal surgery.

If you have a herniated disc, do not despair. Surgery can often be avoided and pain relief achieved with the above methods, either singly or in combination.