At Southern Coast Spine & Pain Specialists, you can find a sciatica doctor in Charleston, SC, to help with the shooting pain you’re experiencing down your leg. We have a dedicated team of pain management specialists and neurosurgeons who understand your pain and how it’s affecting your life.
Our sciatica treatment specialists have techniques to effectively target your sciatica pain and improve your ability to do the things you would normally do.
Can Sciatica Treatment Help You?
You’re suddenly experiencing shooting pain down the back of one leg and in your lower back and buttock. Maybe it feels weirdly numb or tingling. What’s the problem? Symptoms like these sound like sciatica.
What is sciatica? This is a problem that involves your sciatic nerve, which connects from the spine into your buttock and down the back of your leg into the thigh and calf. You have one of these large nerves in each leg, but it’s most common to only experience symptoms on one side when there’s an issue with one of these nerves.
This important nerve is responsible for function and sensation in each leg and foot, but it can also be responsible for pain and other symptoms in those areas. What happens is that the nerve can become pushed against, pinched, or otherwise irritated. This results in the symptoms of sciatica, which often include a burning or shooting pain down the leg, tingling, pins and needles sensations, numbness, weakness in the leg, or trouble moving that leg or foot. You may also have a hard time sitting for too long or standing up.
If you’re having experiences like these that are interfering with your life, our specialists can offer help. We have the experience and innovative treatments to understand and address the problem.
Our Charleston, SC, clinic offers various pain management procedures, which means we can tailor a treatment plan to fit your needs and goals. Our professionals get a full picture of the underlying causes of the pain, treatments you tried that didn’t help, and your ultimate health and wellness goals. They use this information to design an individual treatment plan that works for each specific patient.
What Is the Best Course of Treatment for Sciatica?
What is the best way to manage sciatica? While you’re feeling the pain in your leg, this is “referred pain,” meaning that you’re feeling the pain in a different place from where it originated. This means that focusing on the leg directly, through a course of action like hot and cold therapy or stretching the leg, won’t solve the problem.
Instead, the nerve begins in the back, which is where we want to target treatment. It could happen because of a spinal disc that’s herniated, slipped, bulging, or has degenerative disc disease. Otherwise, it’s also possible that you have spinal stenosis. The pain could also originate from somewhere other than the back, such as with piriformis syndrome, which comes from a tight piriformis muscle in the buttock.
Our specialists can evaluate your situation to see if you have a sciatica diagnosis and find the cause of your situation. Then, we tailor treatment appropriately to address the cause and relieve the referred pain. We tend to use conservative approaches and may try different methods to find the right solution.
Minimally Invasive Sciatica Treatment in Charleston
At Southern Coast Spine & Pain Specialists, our team gets to know you as a person and seeks to understand how the pain is impacting your life. We want to help with your pain and symptoms, both to manage the immediate pain and to provide an ongoing plan that supports your health and keeps problems from reoccurring.
Our team is made up of a variety of pain treatment professionals, including pain management experts in different approaches, board-certified neurosurgeons, and preventive medicine specialists. This team approach allows us to find the ideal solution for your unique situation.
The goal of our team is to provide the most conservative, minimally invasive sciatica treatment possible, only progressing with further treatment if needed. Your treatment plan is entirely tailored to you.
Sciatica Symptom Management Approaches
You may wonder, how do I relieve pressure from my sciatic nerve? When you visit our team, we may try a variety of approaches. Depending on your needs and the causes of the pain, treatment may include:
Pain Medication
Anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxing, or other pain medications may help with the pain and underlying issues like inflammation or tense muscles that are part of the sciatica.
Holistic Pain Management
Our multidisciplinary pain management team may have various natural, holistic approaches for targeting your pain and symptoms.
Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery (MISS)
For cases that are not improving through other methods, we can use minimally invasive surgical options to provide relief from sciatica.
Lifestyle Changes
Our team may recommend you make changes to lifestyle factors that could impact your back and sciatic nerve. For example, these could include stress management techniques, losing weight, and performing certain stretches and exercises.
Injections
We may provide nerve root block injections to target the root of the sciatic nerve. Our professionals use digital x-rays to guide the placement of the injections, which are able to offer effective pain relief for an extended period of time.
Physical Therapy
We have physical therapy professionals who can offer a rehabilitation program with guided exercises and potentially hands-on work to target the sciatic nerve, as well as provide education on exercise programs to follow from home.
How Do You Get Your Sciatic Nerve to Stop Hurting in Charleston, SC?
We can provide a sciatica doctor in Charleston, SC, to help you as soon as you are ready to see us. The next step is to schedule a consultation and assessment. This visit provides answers and a diagnosis, and we recommend a tailored treatment plan. During this time, our team is happy to discuss your questions and concerns.