What Is Sciatica and Why Its So Commonly Misdiagnosed

The question on everyone's mind is “What is Sciatica?”

Sciatica is a term to describe symptoms in the lower back and/or legs that fit the sensation and muscular pattern associated with the sciatica nerve.

The sciatica nerve leaves the spinal cord at the bottom of your back, travels down past the buttock, back of the thigh, calves and into the foot.

Think of a nerve like an electrical wire, its role is to feedback information from our skin or muscles to and from the brain. This gives us the ability to feel and differentiate different sensations and willingly control our legs, which allows us to walk, run, skip, hop or jump to name but a few. 

Sciatica is a term that is overused within the healthcare industry and in our opinion is a lazy way of diagnosing. However any quick google search pops up with symptoms and as long as they somewhat match people will willingly believe it. 

The reason we believe sciatica is a lazy diagnosis is because it doesn't tell you “why?” or “how?” instead it tells you “what?”. 

It's like pulling up to a car garage with a flat tire and the mechanic saying “Your tire is lacking air”. Well you know that otherwise you wouldn't have taken it to the garage. 

The “What” in this case “the sciatic nerve” is the lowest ladder on the diagnosis scale. 

A rung up on the ladder would be to answer the questions “what is causing the sciatica nerve to function poorly?”

Once you've asked enough “what” questions and exhausted that ladder, it's time to move ladders and start asking “Why?” questions 

Here you will start to get closer to the answer you want to solve. 

Ultimately, by the time a person's health has progressed far enough to develop sciatica symptoms they have had dysfunction on some level for months if not years. 

We know from neuroscientists, any pattern that has been present for longer than 2-4 months has now changed the brain's wiring and has started to imbed itself as a bad (maladaptive) habit. 

So the point of any chronic or 2 month + problem starts and ends in the brain's habits. 

If a problem like sciatica is not addressed on a nervous system level considering how the brain has maladaptively changed then you are simply treating the symptoms, not the true root cause. 

I hope we can all agree, something as precious and important as our health deserves to be addressed at the root cause, not just at a surface level. 

If you speak to anybody who has lost their health they will tell you the importance of keepign yours.