Hi everybody. Dr. Jodi Kinney, your chiropractor for low back pain in Belmar, NJ.
Today what I want to do is I want to explain to you the difference between a bulged disc and a herniated disc.
So a lot of times people get these diagnoses from their orthopedics or their, you know, their doctors and they have no idea what that means.
So today I want to kind of break it down so that you can really see the difference, and I have a couple of different props here, too.
So this’ll kind of really get you to get dialed in and understand a little bit more about what’s happening.
So, first thing I want you to know is that when we look at what a normal disc looks like, so first things first, you have discs that start all the way up in the upper cervical spine, go all the way through the cervicals, the thoracics, and all the way down to the lumbars, and the last one is the one that goes in between your lumbar five and what we call S1 or your sacrum.
Okay?
So you have discs, or shock absorbers, in between every one of those vertebra or every one of those bones.
And what they do is those discs create nice space so that you don’t have bone grinding on bone, but they also create this nice opening, or this hole, which is where all the nerves exit out.
So from the brain, down the spinal cord, out every single level are a pair of nerves, and these are what feed your body parts, gives the nerve information to all of your body parts.
So think of a desk as like a jelly donut.
Inside this disc you have these rougher kind of materials of, of fibers, what we call the annulus fibrosis.
The inside is a very jelly-like material called the nucleus pulposus. So normally that is what a normal disc should look like.
Bulged Disc | Chiropractic Belmar, NJ
Now, wear and tear, repetitive stress, poor posture over time, accidents, injuries.
What can happen, longstanding poor hygiene of the disc meaning poor motion, poor exercise, poor alignment, can cause the disc to almost dehydrate.
And some of those outer rings of your donut, or the annulus, can start to get dried up almost and kind of crack if you will.
And it allows some of that jelly to start to push out.
That’s called a bulge.
This in itself can be very painful, because what happens is it starts to push extra, push on the, on the disc calling it intradiscal pressure if you will, but it also starts to congest or create less space where those nerves exit out.
And when that does that, it starts to pinch, or, or create irritation on the nerve.
Herniated Disc | Chiropractic Belmar, NJ
Now, if that jelly squeezes all the way out, if those, the thickness of the annulus is, tears all the way through that nucleus or that jelly is going to squeeze all the way out.
And now it really creates a scenario where there’s no room, no space for the nerves.
So I love this one. This was a new kind of prop that I got this week.
So you can see how the nerves exit out, right?
There’s a nice, healthy disc in between the bones, spinal cord coming down.
If there is abnormal stress on that disc, it’s going to cause that disc to herniate, and then it completely puts pressure on that nerve.
Now, the nerves, remember, don’t only go to the muscles of the back. Many of those nerves go into your butt or your hips.
They can go into the groin for men. Sometimes they get testicular pain.
You can also get shooting pain down one or both of your legs all the way down to the toes.
So the nerves from these areas go all the way down the leg.
So it’s very common for my patients to come in and not only have just lower back pain, but they’re going to have leg pain too.
It’s very, really common. So we treat disks all day long.
So in a previous video that I did, my flexion distraction is one of the best ways that we treat herniated disc.
And when you do that by decompressing the discs, basically, essentially the table allows for the spine to bend and decompresses or helps to take pressure off of those nerves, sometimes even helps to resorb some of that disc material back in, but stretches the muscles, create less pressure, and decompresses the discs and the nerves overall.
We do our very best conservatively to treat disks, herniated and bulging desks with a tremendous amount of success without drugs and without surgery.
However, there does come a time and a place where it is important that we do refer out to surgeons or pain management doctors if we can’t make headway on it.
But know that chiropractic is one of the best resources and one of the best treatments if you have a disc problem.
All right?
So moving forward, moving forward, you should definitely be keeping in mind if you have a lower back injury or a low back problem, chiropractic is one of the best ways to get it fixed.
All right, thanks so much for checking in, check out some of our other videos on how to treat low back pain.
See you soon.
