Not sure if you have sciatica? Pain that radiates from your lower back into one buttock and leg. Burning sensations in these areas. Muscle weakness in one leg or foot. These are all signs that the issue you’re dealing with is sciatica.
Unfortunately, there are far too many Americans dealing with this lower back condition. One medical study reveals that up to 5% of people in the U.S. have at least one episode of sciatica annually. An effective option for treating sciatica is physical therapy, and there are multiple ways that physical therapists can attack this painful lower back problem.
Three ways physical therapy can help reduce sciatica symptoms
The primary goal of physical therapy for sciatica is to reduce your pain and other symptoms. To accomplish this goal, your physical therapist can work to achieve several other goals. These supporting goals include:
- Mobilizing your hips — The sciatic nerves run through your hips. This means that difficulty moving your hip joints can increase your sciatica symptoms. To counter this, your physical therapist will work to mobilize your affected hip joint. Often, this will involve showing you how to do therapeutic hip exercises. A study shows that such mobilization exercises led to a significant improvement in sciatica symptoms in almost 63% of patients.
- Strengthening back muscles — Weak back muscles provide less spinal support. This can make it more likely that your sciatic nerve will be pinched or irritated. Reversing this trend is the reason that physical therapists use techniques like aquatic therapy.
Moving around in a heated pool is intended to help build up your back muscle strength. It can also help decrease your pain. One aquatic therapy study reveals that 90% of lower back pain patients who used it showed a decrease in symptoms.
- Reducing back muscle tension — It’s also important to reduce tension in lower back muscles. After all, such tension can pull the lower spine out of alignment; this tension can lead to recurrent bouts of sciatica symptoms.
Dry needling is one method that physical therapists can use to counteract tense back muscles. A medical study of patients with lower back pain reports that dry needling helped improve patients’ disability scores by more than six points. It also led to a more than 12-point drop in pain scores.
Find effective sciatica physical therapy at Border Therapy Services
Ready to try physical therapy to reduce your sciatica symptoms? Our Border Therapy Services team is ready and willing to help you find the therapy you require. We offer comprehensive screenings that can pinpoint the root cause of your sciatica. Additionally, our physical therapists excel at creating individualized therapy plans designed to reduce your symptoms and prevent them from returning.
Is your back pain keeping you at home? No problem! You can still get therapy from us thanks to the at-home care and virtual therapy appointments we offer.
Contact us today for more information about our back pain therapy services or to schedule your initial appointment.