Sciatica pain management is an unfortunate way of life for many patients affected by the ravages of chronic sciatic nerve pain. Managing pain is fine if there is no option available for providing a real cure, but this is rarely the case with the majority of back and leg pain conditions.
However, many patients achieve very poor results from traditional and complementary medical treatments and simply accept that their life will entail an ongoing battle with sciatica symptoms. It is these patients who are typically enslaved into long lasting programs of symptomatic treatment, which do little except slightly reduce the eternal agony of their back pain. This article provides a look inside the symptomatic treatment industry. We will investigate the limits of symptom-based care and provide a stern warning for patients who intend on using these modalities as a permanent solution for their suffering.
Sciatica Pain Management Medical Specialty
Sciatica pain management is an up and coming medical specialty which is both extremely in-demand and ultra profitable. Doctors are explicitly warned during their educational process not to treat the symptoms of any injury or disease as a separate condition, but it seems that pain specialists must have missed this valuable lesson. Instead of even attempting to resolve the underlying causation of sciatica, pain specialists instead simply ignore it and provide pharmaceutical relief for the pain and related neurological symptoms.
Treatment might come in the way of epidural injections or pills, but drugs are virtually always part of traditional medical care, in one form or another.
Pain Management Drugs
Sciatica drugs sometimes consist of anti-inflammatory medicines and muscle relaxants, but mostly focus on pain relief. There are so many drugs used to treat sciatica pain and every one has potentially dangerous known and unknown side effects. Many of these powerful pills also demonstrate an inherent risk of dependency which can cause far worse problems for any addicted patient.
Drugs are the worst possible solution for ongoing chronic sciatica, yet they are the most common treatment modality. Doctors love to give them out, since they make a day at the office so much easier: No thinking, no real responsibility. Just hand out the drugs and hope for the best. If there is a problem, let the drug manufacturer sort it out. This is a completely unacceptable attitude, but is not as rare as you might think within the medical professions.
Remember, not only is treatment by prescription the fastest and easiest, it is also the most profitable, since these same drug companies provide huge financial incentives to doctors who hand out scripts for their products.
Alternative Sciatica Pain Management
There are other forms of pain management which are also symptomatic modalities, yet maintain far less risk than perpetual drug use.
Some of the best of these methods are also all natural or holistic therapies, such as acupuncture and exercise.
Chiropractic is often used for pain relief, although the goal of the treatment should be to accomplish more than just day-to-day symptom management.
TENS is another typical pain reliever, although there is considerable speculation that any positive effects of the treatment might be purely due to the placebo effect in many patients.
Advice on Pain Management Options
Please, no hate mail from doctors regarding this article. If you are doing your job correctly, this article is not meant to describe you, in particular. I have nothing but respect for healthcare workers of every healing art who perform their jobs with ethics and human dignity. This article is directed at all the doctors who have simply allowed $$$ to get in the way of proper patient care. Maybe they have simply given up hope, since so many of their treatment modalities are virtually useless against stubborn back pain. I would not be surprised if this were indeed the case.
For all you sciatica patients, I recommend trying to find a real cure instead of acquiescing to a life of pain management. It is never too late to find permanent relief. Look at me: It took 18 long years of the worst possible suffering to finally become pain-free.
If you do require help managing sciatica, try to stick to the non-pharmaceutical varieties as much as humanly possible. I find that the negative aspects of most of these pharmaceutical symptomatic treatments far outweigh the positive. I am confident that if you saw the same number of beautiful lives ruined by drugs that I have witnessed, you would wholeheartedly agree.
