Sciatica - Acupressure and Trigger Point Therapy

Knowing what I know now, having eliminated my sciatic pain completely, strengthening exercises were probably the worst thing I did for for my sciatic pain or any other kind of nerve damage. Nerves can be irritated when they get trapped inside constricted muscles, so when I would tighten the muscles in my back and buttocks through the wrong exercises, it just ended up putting more pressure on the nerve, increasing the pain. Eventually I did find a physical therapist who actually helped me a great deal with my leg pain and other orthopedic problems. The PT that helped me focused more on holistic therapies, proper body alignment and balancing my muscles, rather than the strengthening and weight training exercises preferred by many of his less knowledgeable colleagues.

Recommended Books:

Acupressure's Potent Points: A Guide to Self-Care for Common Ailments

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief

Listed below are some tips I found helpful for sciatic treatment

1. Trigger point therapy - I found trigger point therapy, which is a form of self massage, to be highly effective for pain relief for many musculoskeletal problems, and especially for sciatica. Trigger points are small contractions in muscles that respond to counter pressure. They can tighten up your muscles, which in turn can entrap and impinge on surrounding nerves.

The book The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook is a good resource for eliminating trigger points related to sciatica. The book includes specific information on sciatic nerve compression, including illustrations of how the sciatic nerve can get compressed by surrounding muscles. The book also includes anatomy diagrams which show the location of trigger points to press that are often helpful for sciatic pain.

When I'm on vacation and don't want to bring my self massage tools and books, I just roll around on the floor on a tennis ball under the back of my legs, my back and buttocks. It's not as effective or sophisticated as the techniques described in the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, but it still helps. By rolling around enough I eventually hit upon enough trigger points to loosen up my muscles.

2. I also found acupressure to be helpful for sciatic pain. The book Acupressure's Potent Points: A Guide to Self-Care for Common Ailments has a good chapter on gentle exercises and acupressure points for both sciatica and lower back pain.* While there is some overlap between the points mentioned in the trigger point book to press for sciatic pain and the points to press in the acupressure book, there are also some significant differences. The trigger point book focuses on points to push to relieve tension directly near or surrounding the sciatic nerve with the goal of freeing the sciatic nerve from muscular tension and entrapment.

The acupressure book includes points to press in other areas of the body that are thought to stimulate healing. The concept behind acupressure is that stimulating certain "potent points" in the body triggers the release of endorphins that help to relieve pain. In the words of the author, "pain is blocked and the flow of blood and oxygen to the affected area is increased. This causes muscles to relax and promotes healing."

In addition to pressing on potent points, the acupressure book also recommends the knee to chest exercise, which is the one gentle exercise that I think probably works the best for sciatica pain. To do it, I lie on the floor on my back and bring my knees to my chest and hold them there for awhile. When I do this, I can feel a gentle stretch in my buttocks, which I think releases some of the pressure on the sciatic nerve there. Sometimes it helps to move my knees around in circles to give some extra stretches to my back and buttock muscles. Another way to add to the stretch is to rock back and forth gently. However, I always stop at the first sign of pain. Once the nerve gets irritated it is hard to get it calmed down, so it is best to go very slowly and easily.

Another tip from this book I've used is to make a self massage tool using two tennis balls in a sock. I lay down on the sock with the tennis balls massaging the acupressure points on either side of my spine. I have found this to be very effective, too, for both sciatica and relieving back tension in general. One of my sons was complaining once about his legs being tight, but for some reason he did the tennis ball massage on his back instead of a leg exercise. He said his legs felt significantly better after only a few minutes of lying on the tennis balls. I think this was interesting because it is a good example of how tension in one part of your body can cause pain in other parts. My son felt the pain in his legs, but clearly at least part of the cause of his pain was in his back, or else the back self massage would not have been effective.

Another option is to buy a dog toy with rubber balls on either end. I have one I bought at Petco that is the perfect for acupressure along the spine, and it cost about a third as much as most massage tools.

* It's also a good book to have to keep around the house for general usage. I've found it very helpful for headaches and knee pain, too.

When I was out of acute pain from sciatica, I was able to do selected yoga poses, which I've written up in my section on yoga postures for sciatica . However, for times when my sciatic nerve was really irritated, the knee to chest exercise, the tennis ball treatments, trigger point therapy and acupressure are the treatments I found that worked the best. The benefits of these approaches for sciatic pain are:

• They don't have any side effects as prescription drugs might.
• They are inexpensive.
• They are easy to self administer for anyone who can follow simple diagrams
• They attempt to address the root cause of sciatic pain (the trapped or compressed nerve) rather than suppressing symptoms (like prescription drugs do when they block out the pain).

Related Pages:

Natural Therapies - overview of holistic therapy methods for sciaitc nerve pain.

Sciatica - Helpful Exercises and Yoga Poses

Stretches - a couple of illustrated, sample stretches for sciatica.

How Exercise Helped My Scoliosis

Scoliosis Exercises - Part I - Yoga and the Egoscue Method

Yoga for Back Pain

Neck Pain

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