Hi folks
I'm Bob Schrupp physical therapist, Brad Heineck physical therapist. Together we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet, in our opinion of course Bob, our humble opinion
Today Brad we're gonna talk about the top seven signs you can heal your own sciatica or herniated discs
This is the work based upon
Robin McKenzie, in fact you may if you like what we're seeing today
You might want to get his book "Treat Your Own Back" kind of you know spells everything out
We also have a lot of videos on it and
It is a nice book. It's made for a patient. It's for the layperson so you can
Understand and follow and treat yourself
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All right, so top seven signs now again
These are based upon Robin McKenzie
And he's you know if you have you know you don't have to say yes to all these
But if you say yes to four or more
There's a good chance you could heal your own sciatic or
Herniated disc or number one you have periods of the day
Even if it's short as ten minutes where you have no pain,
The bad sign is if you're having pain all the time. I mean it just doesn't go away ever, yeah no matter what
You do no matter how you lay down no matter what position you're in so pain
We're talking not only pain, but some numbness tingling going down the leg yeah any pain at all though
I mean if you lay down, and you can't make that pain go away
I mean, that's a bad sign. Again not saying it won't heal because you might have four of the other ones that are good
Number two you're generally worse with sitting and
We should show this Brad
Generally worse with sitting and
Getting up from sitting and the reason behind that is a lot of times Y]you're a little bit flexed, your back is flexed
Even if you sit up straight, your back is somewhat flexed
And then when you get up what happens Brad? You're bending forward. Yeah
It's hard to straighten oftentimes
Generally what we're seeing is if you're doing activities that bend forward make it worse and you straighten up
It's better then that's a good sign so that's number two number three
Is just what I was alluding to if it's worse right after you're doing prolonged bending or stooping like if you're making the bed
And it's a lot worse after that
Vacuuming especially when you're bending and twisting with that
Ironing gardening and this makes me laugh because it was written down laying concrete
I did lay concrete early on my life, and I did it for a year and a half, but I
don't think the average person is laying concrete. I'll tell my wife you quit laying the concrete! Yeah, that's right
You got back pain don't lay that concrete, all right number four it's generally worse in the morning
But it tends to improve after about a half hour. Do you want to explain
What goes on at night Brad in the disc? Oh sure it's one of my favorite things
The disks have fluid inside and when you stand up throughout the day the fluid actually
diffuses out through the walls
And then the disc gets small and at night that fluid goes back in it imbibes
Oh, I stole the word from you
Didn't I, yeah and ruined my story
But the imbibition happens in your fluid
And that's how you just stay healthier because the fluid you get new fluid with nutrients going in and throughout the day
It uses that nutrients and it pushes that old fluid out and there's a cycle every day
So if you're having a disc problem and fluid comes in on it
You can see how that might make it feel worse in the mornings. It's full of pressure, it's like
You're gonna balloon and fill it up, and if it's healthy it's no problem
But if it's sore and you got a bulging disc it all causes issues
Which brings up by the way the interesting fact Brad that
Generally you are taller in the morning than you are at night because you start to squeeze that fluid out by the end of the day
So I'm seven foot two in the mornings
By the end of the night, I'm five foot five so yeah, and as you get older you shrink
That's another story, all right going on generally
It's worse when you're inactive, and it's better when you're on the move a lot of times it's better with walking
That's a good sign
And you should try some walking to see if it does get better because sometimes it's like oh
No, it hurts it hurts it hurts
But then once they walk a few you know a hundred yards, then all of a sudden it starts to feel better
So you want to put it to the test
Number six
If the pain at this point is confined to above the knee you're gonna have a lot better chance of healing it
This is not to say that if it goes below the knee you can't heal it because I've had many people that have
It's just it's again one of those signs. It's better in your favor if it hasn't gone down below the knee yet
And number seven let's go ahead and take this out of the way here Brad if you're better
generally face down
like this laying down
And it starts to feel better after a few minutes and again
You got to put it to the test you actually gotta lay here a little bit because it might hurt when you first lay down
Then that's a good sign so
Those are the seven signs if you have four of them you've got a really good chance of healing your sciatica
I will take a couple pillows Brad
Yeah, actually get a piece of paper out
You might have to rewatch the video and see what signs you have if you
Didn't keep track of it cuz it is can be specific
And if you have the four positive signs you're gonna want to watch our videos on Mckenzie, the Mckenzie program because we're gonna
Just type in Bob and Brad in the
Search engine up top
Type in Mckenzie
M-C-K-E-N-Z-I-E or if you put
sciatica or herniated disc, we'll show you this real quick here Brad
Maybe the beginning of it, want to give me another pillow
So a lot of times some people cannot tolerate laying on their stomach yet to start off
So what they do is they put a couple pillows like this, if you're really bad
I mean if you can lay on your stomach go ahead
But you lay down on your stomach like this and this is all you're gonna do on the first day probably and
Your head may be down but he's talking
But then you know over time what you try to do is start slipping pillows out
And eventually you're gonna get to the point where you slip them all out
And you're flat like this you're gonna lay like this
And then eventually you're gonna do what we call the prone prop here where you're propping on your elbows
I've had this progression in one visit. Yeah first visit
I've had two pillows underneath and within a few minutes take one out and then another
And maybe not all the way up to here in one visit, and that's what you want to see
Or you may be able to lay down on your stomach right away
And that's great so then the next step by the way, you know is gonna be putting your hands underneath your shoulders
And you're gonna start pressing up like this. What are we looking for Brad? What are we looking for the pain to do?
Centralize, so in other words if he's got pain and symptoms going down the leg and you do
like five or six press ups or up to ten press ups and all of a sudden clearly
There's no pain below the knee anymore when before it was to the ankle
It's gone from there, and it's from here up boy. That's great rest a little bit do another ten
You know things are really going good it may
Centralize and get out of the leg completely, if that happens you have a very good chance of healing it through exercise
If you have the other thing going on let's say it's getting worse in the leg when you do this
Then you're gonna have to do some of the advanced things that we do in some of our videos
There's all these different things you can try to see if you can get it to come out of the leg, but that's the general
Goal is to get it out of the leg and you're gonna wanna go further and further
I mean you're back again as pain will allow you want it to actually feel better
But you eventually want to press all the way up like this
Now this is something again that you're not just doing once a day
You're trying to do this five to eight times a day
Like ten repetitions, right and you're not gonna have to do it for months at a time
Once it starts improving
It can progress quite rapidly within a week you may be not a hundred percent but much better
And I've had people that we've actually had them take
Cardboard to their factory and they they go down into a you know into the corner and actually do some press ups
The cardboard is because the floor is dirty. Yeah
Exactly, but you know
This is very
This very much can disable you for
And you you're not able to work so a lot of people are willing to do things like that because it
Really does affect your life. I mean it affects everything you do. I had a really good patient this is a true story
He was having success with his press-ups, and they had a scheduled trip to Las Vegas and they went
And they were in a store because his wife was shopping, and he's down. He goes down in an aisle right in the store
Well, I'll tell you what's funny is if you go to a conference with physical therapists
You know you have a roomful of therapists. They don't think twice of doing things like that
I mean I've seen people they'll get up in the middle while someone's talking,
Because eventually hopefully what you can do is actually standing back bends too like this
They usually don't come until later that you can do those and you see people doing stuff like that all the time at conferences
Well, you know if you're a therapist you could appreciate this, if not you're just getting bored
All right again check out our other videos on the McKenzie Technique
We got lots of them or like you said sciatica
And we'll hopefully get you on the road to recovery, right and again the McKenzie book
It's only like I think around $10
It's a lot lot cheaper than a $200 visit to the doctor, right yeah, thanks for watching.