SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) - If you've ever experienced sciatic pain -- that electric shock feeling in your legs -- you're not alone: 40% of the U.S. population will experience it at some point in their lives.
"Sciatica is a really common condition. Patients often describe it as a shooting pain that travels from the lower back down the leg. There's usually often numbness, tingling, sometimes weakness," Dr. Blake Taylor, a neurosurgeon at UCSF Health, told KCBS Radio's Patti Reising on this week's episode of "As Prescribed."
While many people experience back pain, sciatica is distinctively different.
"When we think of back pain, we think of more middle of the lower back, maybe a little bit to the side. But the sciatica is more of a leg pain. So, it's more of an electric shock-like pain that travels from the lower back down the leg," said Dr. Taylor. "Patients with sciatica usually will complain more of leg pain than of the back pain."
One of the most common causes of sciatic pain is from a herniated disc in the low back, which can be caused by an injury or just degeneration over time. The problem, according to Dr. Taylor, is that most people with herniated discs don't realize they have one.
"Most of them are not symptomatic. Most of you would never know about it," he said. "But classically speaking, what often happens is there's someone who is often a middle-aged adult who is lifting something heavy or doing some sort of strenuous movement. And then all of a sudden they have sciatica. They have pain shooting down their leg."
"It's usually pretty severe and they're often bedridden and they can't move because of the pain," Dr. Taylor added. "But in general, it's often triggered by heavy lifting or significant bending or twisting movements."
One of the most common ways to diagnose sciatica is an MRI, but doctors also look for other red flags.
"One of the red flags is what we call a dropped foot, which is when there's significant weakness of the ability to move the foot in an upwards direction. And that can be due to a problem of the nerve as it comes out of the spine. Other red flags are problems with your bowel or your bladder function, like incontinence," he said. "When there's a herniated disc, for example, if it's pushing on the spine and it's pushing significantly on the spine, that can cause incontinence. And that's very dangerous. The other thing that goes along with that is numbness in the groin area."
Dr. Taylor said the goal is always to try treatment without surgery first, which typically includes a short course of steroids, Tylenol and physical therapy for about six weeks.
"It's not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but the general rule of thumb is about six weeks of conservative management" before a patient considers surgery, he said.
Listen to this week's "As Prescribed" to learn more. You can also listen to last week's episode to hear how researchers discovered how to make ordinary fat cells burn calories, here.
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"As Prescribed" is sponsored by UCSF.