Many patients have suffered an entire adult lifetime of sciatica, with pain that persists year after year. These people are often greatly diminished in their physical abilities and some are completely disabled. Life has not gone their way and many are at the proverbial ends of their rope, clutching to the flayed ends of sanity just trying function each day.
Sciatica tends to stick around. This we all know. It might get better for a time, but completely curing sciatica is virtually unheard of, except for people who finally dispel the myths and learn the true facts of the condition itself and its actual causes. Unfortunately, this accounts for less than 1% of the total sciatica patient population, while countless millions continue to suffer.
This essay helps to explain why sciatica is so relentless in its quest to ruin lives. We will discuss the mistakes patients make when coping with sciatica and the fundamental misunderstandings that actually empower the pain to control life itself.
A Lifetime of Suffering
Sciatica is always ranked at the top of the list of pain syndromes which tend to become chronic concerns. It is also at the top of the list that describes syndromes which are actively treated and operated upon surgically, yet persist. It seems that sciatica scoffs in the face of most therapies, regardless of what they seek to accomplish or how they work.
Patients write to us routinely citing decades of sciatica suffering, typically following some trigger occurrence, such as an actual or perceived injury. In virtually all cases, this trigger is incidental and not relevant to the years’ worth of misery that follow.
Virtually all patients with chronic sciatica treat the pain aggressively and a significant percentage of people already had at least one surgery, while some have suffered many surgical blunders already without finding any relief.
Coping with a Lifetime of Sciatica
Coping with sciatica can become much more of a problem than the pain itself. The vast majority of patients utilize powerful pain management drugs over very long timelines of therapy. This pharmacological poisoning can maim and kill and often does. It shocks us how few patients understand the risks of drug therapies. It also shocks us the naiveté of patients who never link their eventual health collapse, organ failure, disease and other catastrophic issues to the years of toxic drugs they have been given for pain.
In a few cases, patients choose to cope with the pain using some other form of treatment and the smartest patients rely on natural and holistic methods of care that might be a financial strain, but are at least not hazardous to their health.
Many, many patients choose surgical fixes, which we all know fail far more often than they succeed. The general reason for surgical disappointment is misdiagnosis of the underlying source of pain. Basically, the structural condition blamed for sourcing the pain is surgically corrected, but this abnormality was never the origin of pain. The doctor must take acting lessons to provide a convincing reply when confronted by the patient, who still has pain after their operation was deemed to be a “complete success”. This unnecessary surgical butchery is a literal crime that gets swept under the rug throughout the medical establishment.
Lifetime of Sciatica Misunderstandings
Patients tend to have little knowledge about sciatica. We have written many essays on this truth already and suggest that all patients read our dialog titled “What is sciatica” right now if they have not already done so. Once you read this essay, you will already know more than 99% of your peers…
Sciatica is not a diagnosis. Never. It is merely a symptom of some other diagnosis. Therefore, if ANY doctor diagnoses you with sciatica, you are already on the path to failure in whatever treatment they recommend. We virtually guarantee that it will fail… This we know from decades of clinical experience, patient education and chronic pain advocacy.
Sciatica is also much rarer than its related condition pseudo-sciatica. If you do not understand the crucial difference between these 2 symptom sets, then you will likely never cure your pain. Please read about spinal sciatica and contrast it against the much more prevalent pseudo-sciatica before ending this article. Most treatment is directed at spinal sciatica, while the true origin of pain is actually creating pseudo-sciatica.
Finally know for sure that chronic pain always has a psychological side and many cases are completely psychologically-motivated. This does not mean that they are not real. They are just as real as pain from a gunshot, car accident or horrific fall from height. However, these conditions are not created due to structural pathology, but instead by psychoemotional maladaptation that has become universal to modern humans. We all have mindbody pain conditions, as proven by the groundbreaking work of Dr. John E. Sarno, but fortunately, these terrible chronic sufferings can be cured. Knowledge therapy is the path you will need to investigate in order to end your pain forever.
