Hello! This is Dr. George Best and this is the third installment in my series on how to save money and recover faster from sciatica and disc-related lower back pain. And in this installment I'm going to be discussing the self treatment that you can use to improve your condition as quickly as you can and reduce the amount of need for professional treatment than anything that you would have to spend your money on.
The first thing that I want to discuss is -- in the second installment, I referenced this document here that was put out by the US Department of Health and Human Services in 1994. And in the last installment, I mentioned that half of the therapies, things are done to you were found to be ineffective. There was a big exception to that and that was the use of ice and heat. And the use of ice and heat will depend whether you have more of an inflammatory condition such as disc herniation you would want to use ice.
If you're more in a degenerative type condition then you would typically want to use heat to kind of get some more circulation back to the muscles and help these allow the symptoms that way. But for either ice or heat, what they found in that study was that, they are effective however, what they recommended was that they are effective for home use, not for use in a doctor's office or a physical therapist's office as a further treatment. Why is this?
Well, the thing is that frequency is the key and I'm really coming back to that repeatedly in this particular video. Frequency is the key. If you are going to a doctor or physical therapist's office and you're putting ice on your heat on whichever it may be and you are only getting that treatment while you're in the doctor's office, so it maybe once a day, maybe once every few days, maybe couple of times a week something like that. The effects of it are not as good as if you're using it more frequently on your own at home.
So what does this mean? Well for the severe acute stage of disc herniation which is producing pain or back pain or sciatica, what I recommend people do is they apply an ice pack and you want to make sure that you have at least a thin layer of cloth between the ice pack and your skin to prevent skin damage from the cold. But put the ice on for about 15 minutes at a time and you can do this up to every hour. And you want to make sure that the temperature of the skin is back to normal before you apply the ice. So a lot of experts recommend every two hours just to be on the extra safe side for situations especially if somebody has diminished circulation such as with diabetes or something like that.
But in an otherwise healthy, somebody who has got sciatica is obviously not healthy. But in otherwise healthy person, I'd say about every hour to basically control the inflammation, reduce swelling and reduce pain. So ice can be your best friend during the inflammatory stage. In those cases, where there is a lot of degeneration and because of the degeneration there is been lack of movement and the muscles have become very stiff and tight, then heat, and again, same type of thing, you want to apply it for 15 minutes.
With heat I recommend, you have to be more cautious because you can trigger inflammation with heat and for that reason I would say not more than every two hours on heat to help somebody who has got more of a degenerative type of situation. Now, as I said, frequency is the key on ice and heat. Frequency is also the key on exercises and this is why I am such a big proponent of home exercises because again if you're doing exercises in a physical therapist's office, or doctor's office, you maybe doing exercises once every other day. Usually they are not going to see you everyday. In most cases it's three days a week or something like that. And with a disc problem, especially in the stage where it's really fired up, you are getting a lot of pain in sciatica and that type of thing, you need to do some gentle exercises but do them very, very frequently.
For example, the exercises that I show in my video Sciatica Exercises Part 1, here on YouTube, if you do that exercise, multiple times throughout the day, I mean even up to a few times an hour, for a minute of so at a time, you'll get a much, much greater benefit out of it, than if you do it once or do 10, or 15, or 20 minutes or even 30 minutes but once in a day and then don't do it anymore that day. So frequency is the key. And the reason for that is, is because the disc is a pressurized system and you're going to have to keep reinforcing what you're doing with it.
What happens when the disc is bulging out is that you're going to have to retrain it to pull it back in and if you pull it back in once and you then go about doing whatever else you're doing, just the gravitational stresses on there, are going to make it want to bulge back out again.
So you want to bring that bulge back in and bring that bulge back in and you want to get frequent episodes of pulling that disc back in, so that as the disc holds in nutrition and the body's healing process are engaged, it will be pulled back in and it will start to hold little better. It will pull back in and it will hold a little better. So you need to do this frequently to get the best results.
So that's the big key on those exercises and on the use of ice and heat, especially during the intense symptomatic phase of these types of problems. Frequency, frequency, frequency, do it a lot. So that is something I can't emphasize enough. You have to do these things a lot to get the best results. So the more you do this, the quicker you'll be able to recover and the quicker you'll be able to start doing the things you like to do again.
So remember frequency is the key. Now, you don't need anything special other than usually afford to do these things. So, you can do them pretty much anywhere. If you happen to be in a situation where you have to still be at work, and you don't want to get down on the floor to do floor exercises or something like that, you can do some more things through the extension exercises and you can do kind of stand up and bend backwards. This probably takes me to another aspect of where frequency is the key. Sitting is usually the enemy of anybody who has these types of problems. The exception to that is somebody who has spinal stenosis, due a lot of degeneration in the spine in which case sitting may actually be a good position for them.
But for somebody with the disc herniation, typically sitting is bad and the reason why is that, sitting puts the spine in a flex position which tends to put more pressure at the front part of the disc and drive the disc material back into the nerves. So although sitting maybe comfortable while you're doing it when you go to stand up again, you could be in trouble if you've been sitting for a long period of time.
So here we go again. Frequency is the key. And in this case, I'm talking about frequent breaks from sitting. And I understand some people you have got to be working, you're going to be making money. So what I recommend for people who are in that situation and they are having these problems is to stand up, do a brief amount of stretching, usually stretching backwards, putting your hands in the back and bending backwards slightly, do that for 30 seconds. It doesn't take a lot to help yourself out. Do that quick stretch break if you can, walk around for maybe a minute or two, that helps quite a bit and you do it frequently. You do it every, if you can, every 15 minutes is great.
Some people in the work situation will allow that. If you do it every 30 minutes, that's good. You can doing every hour, whatever you can do, the more frequently you do that and you're still able to get your job done of course, so you don't get fired, the better you're going to get, the faster you're going to get better.
So frequency is the key to any of these self-treatment techniques that are available here on YouTube, of course my videos, and other peoples videos, as well as the information I have available on my website. So this is the end of part III of this video series. I thank you for watching and I hope you have gotten a lot of value out of this set of videos. Thanks again. This is Dr. Best saying good bye.
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