Sciatica treatment is usually given to people who have been bending in the wrong place with poor posture for many years. In this article, you will read about how various habits can stress the spine, and how you can avoid the problem completely just by adjusting your daily habits.

The shooting pain known as sciatica occurs when pressure is applied to the sciatic nerve. This usually happens when an intervertebral disc becomes prolapsed, known as a slipped disc. When the discs bulge, they often create pressure on the sciatic nerve where it exits from the spine. This is usually experienced as a numbness in the buttock stretching down the leg and sometimes all the way to the foot.

Finding the root cause of sciatica it is the most effective way to understand, and treat the problem in the long term. Therefore, it is important to realise how a disc becomes prolapsed to begin with. Commonly a prolapsed disc happens after years of bending and moving in an unhealthy manner. Whilst doctors don’t usually address this root cause, Alexander technique teacher’s specialise in it and they have an unbeaten track record in dealing with sciatica that cannot be shifted easily.

The Alexander technique was founded over a century ago, however up until recent years it had very little scientific study conducted on it, so there wasn’t much to back it up. The British medical Journal in August 2008 conducted a study of the technique and concluded that it was a viable solution to back pain in general, including sciatica.

Alexander technique lessons involve no violent manipulation of your limbs, but instead the teacher will softly correct your posture in order to release muscle tension. Usually, the people who suffer the most from back pain have some ingrained postural habits that have developed over many years and have ended up manifesting themselves as physical damage. To reverse these habits, and retain our natural healthy posture, the student has to take a certain amount of responsibility to make this happen. In this way the Alexander technique has more similarities with teaching primary school children mathematics than in the traditional Western approach to treating illness which is to prescribe medicine to patients.

To become liberated from the pain of sciatica does take a bit of time and the willingness to change, but it is by no means rocket science. It doesn’t entail any strange stretches or using any strange contraptions, it is really just applied common sense. For instance, you might have had the experience of catching your own reflection in a shop window as you walk down the street and being surprised at how your posture is worse than you imagined. This surprise happens because the image that we see doesn’t match up to the way that we think we are. The founder of the Alexander technique, FM Alexander, called this phenomenon faulty sensory perception.

To get a practical experience of what faulty sensory perception is all about, all you have to do is fold your arms. Then without thinking about it just fold them the other way. 90% of people will remark that folding the arms the opposite way doesn’t feel quite right, although they won’t always be able to tell you why. The truth is that we never fold their arms in any other way so we have an ingrained habit. In a similar way, everyone’s posture at whether right or wrong feels normal to the individual. A lot of the time one Alexander technique teacher corrects posture, the student remarks that is it feels wrong, like they’re leaning backwards. However, their reflection in the mirror will confirm that their posture is actually totally different to what they may think.

With sciatica, the ingrained habits that are resulting in the pressure on the sciatic nerve feel perfectly normal to the sufferer, however this is the one thing that is causing them their pain.Making the link between these postural habits and the pain is the first step of many towards becoming completely pain free forever.

Now, the chances are that you have probably become quite self conscious of your posture as you have been reading this article, pulling your shoulders back and sticking out your chest to get rid of your rounded shoulders. Nice try. Unfortunately, all you have been doing is partaking in a game of tag on war between your muscles. What I mean by this is that when you pull your shoulders back you are effectively tensing up one muscle in order to compensate for a different tensed muscle that is in opposition. The result is that after five minutes your muscles become tired and you will revert back to your original slumped posture.

At in order to solve this problem thoroughly, you need not to increase the amount of tension in your body, but to actually reduce the excess tension you had originally. And this is precisely what an Alexander technique lesson can help you to do.

I hope this has been of some help to those who are in desperate need of sciatica treatment. For more interesting information on this subject please visit the Sciatica Treatment Blog.