Degenerative Disc Disease – Symptoms & Diagnosis

Have you been told that you have degenerative disc disease in your lower back? A lot of people get left hanging by their doctor, they don’t really explain it, they have an MRI or an X ray, and their doctor just tells them that they have degenerative disc disease. But they don’t tell them how they got it, what it means exactly, and what it means for them in the future. More so it doesn’t really explain the pain.

I mean, it gives a general explanation for why the individual why you might be having stiffness and pain in your back maybe pain going down into your legs as well. But it doesn’t fully explain the what’s going on inside the back and how the degenerative disc disease got there, so that you might have a chance at stopping it from getting worse, or maybe even reversing it.

Well In today’s video, I’m going to explain what degenerative disc disease is, and how it got there and what to begin to do to resolve it. My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist from El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding an unnecessary surgery injections, and pain medications.

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So let’s answer the question what is degenerative disc disease I’ve got a little image here it’s a it’s nothing fancy, because degenerative disc disease really isn’t anything fancy. It’s something that just happens slowly over time. So on the on this side, over here, you’ve got five lumbar vertebrae, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then the tailbone for the sacrum. Down here at the bottom. In the blue things in the middle are the discs, you have these squishy discs that act like springs between all the bones, all the vertebrae in the low back.

This is an example of a healthy, lower back healthy discs, everything’s normal here, but over on the other side. And things aren’t in proportion here, I’m just going to highlight the problems. You’ve got five vertebrae, and you can see they’ve got rough edges around them. What happens in degenerative disc disease is the bones change shape slightly, you get things called bone spurs, you get osteophytes, you get basically abnormalities around the edges of the bones.

You’ve also got decreased disc height, so the discs get kind of squashed. And they don’t work the way they’re supposed to anymore. They’re not going to give that springing shock absorption like they’re supposed to, they end up getting herniated. That’s the red is here. And they can pinch nerves, there’s nerves that come out between all these bones. And these osteo fights are these abnormalities that develop on the bones and the disc herniation.

The disc injuries can pensioners as well, what this does, I don’t even draw the joints that’s way more complicated to draw. But the joints on the backside of the spine, where there’s movement, you can also get arthritis, which means the joints aren’t moving very good, they can get stuck, they don’t have their full mobility. And this causes poor mechanics or movement in the lower back. So it leads to compensations.

It leads to certain parts of the back moving too much in other parts of the back getting really stiff. And that’s what feeds into getting these osteophytes are these bone abnormalities, abnormalities, and these disc herniations these disc injuries as well. So most doctors will just tell you, you have degenerative disc disease and they may they may also throw in there you have arthritis, you have a pinched nerve, you have this damage this, you know, disc herniation, they may throw other things in there that are all usually part of the same process.

And it’s very scary to just be left there because the doctor will just say, well, you can get medications if you want, you can have an injection, sometimes we’ll recommend a surgery if if the disc is way too compressed, and it’s affecting a nerve quite a bit.

But they don’t really give you a solution. And then the fact is, they are not supposed to their job is not to fix a mechanical problem. They’re Doctor of Medicine, which means they give you medications if you go see a surgeon, they’re surgeons so they’re going to look at what they can operate on. But fixing something like this naturally is not typically done that so usually done by an expert like myself, I’m a manual physical therapist.

So I look at the body very mechanically, and we look and see what’s moving and what’s not. Here in the clinic. We see people with degenerative disease, this disease all the time. And what we look at first, we have to kind of find all the different problems. There’s usually a laundry list of problems in a degenerative disc disease problem, because it’s been accumulating over time.

We’ve got to iron stiffen the stuck joints, we’ve got to free up muscles because usually there’s a muscle imbalance where one side of the body usually on the back, the muscles that are right over here are too strong and stiff and when they shorten, and they get too strong. They compress the spine quite a bit and then over time, that’s what causes all those osteophytes.

That’s what feeds into it. And so a big priority in most cases of degenerative disc disease is to free up those back muscles so that we can take off the compression and get more normal motion between each of those back bones in the spine, I can tell you it is a process. It’s never just one exercise, or one treatment visit, or even just a few exercises or a few treatment visits that fix degenerative disc disease.

It is a process over time, we’ve got to take people through progressions of exercises over the course of months usually, and then we’ve got to free up the joints one by one and maintain them free, because I might go in there into somebody’s back, you know, move their back joints and be freed up in an instant, in one visit.

But it’s going to get stiff again, and they’re going to be in the exact same place they were before I did the hands on work unless they do some sort of exercise. And this needs to be repeatedly done over time. The reason for that is there’s lots of cartilage inside the spine between all the joints, of course, the discs themselves are a form of cartilage. And so when we get better motion inside all these joints, we can allow the cartilage to begin to heal and become slightly more normalized.

The thing about cartilage, especially the discs, they heal super slow, that’s just their normal, they also get injured quite slow. And so when we start doing treatment, we’re not expecting somebody to improve right away in the first two or three visits, were looking for some mild improvement really about a month out, it takes some time.

So if you’re out there, you’re dealing with this degenerative disc disease, there are exercises to get started. In fact, I made a video that show you the first exercises to do the link is in the description below. Go check that out. But you’ve got to realize that it is a process over time and you’ve got to keep doing exercises to stay on top of this and not let your muscles start to tighten up your back again, then you may need professional help.

You may need help from an expert like myself to by hand, get those joints that are truly stuck that you won’t free up on your own doing exercises because they’ve been stuck for so long, the cartilage is so dehydrated and not mobile, that by hand, we might need a freed up over the course of treatments. So the good news about this is it’s fixable, you can actually get tremendously better.

I can tell you I’ve seen patients in their 80s that have had degenerative disc disease for years. doctors don’t want to operate on them because they’ve got too many areas that are affected, basically the surgeon saying I can operate here and here and here and here. And I don’t know that I’ll even touch the problem very well, it will still be issues and we’ll push it to do too much surgery in order to get to the point that we think we can.

So we’ve had surgeons just tell our patients Nope, I’m not going to touch you, you’re too complicated. But then they come here we do all the stuff that I just talked about freeing up their joints, freeing up their muscles or ligaments or tendons getting their cartilage to heal a bit, teaching them the right exercises and proper movement.

They can get tremendously better despite having a bad X ray or MRI. Despite having the loss of disc height, the bone spurs, the osteophytes, the pensioners all that stuff, they can increase their mobility, take pressure off the nerves and get back to moving decently normal again, the typical treatment for this is they’ll give you pain medications by mouth, of course, they might give you injections. And it’s what we call palliative care. In other words, they don’t ever hope that it’s going to get 100% better or anywhere near 100% better.

They’re just giving you medications just to kind of hold you over until you need medications again, and potentially a surgery later on. If it’s even allowable for you by your surgeon. Let me just talk about how you can tell yourself if you’ve got true degenerative disc disease. Number one, you’re going to have an MRI or an X ray that where they told you that’s that’s the the biggest diagnosis if you go to the doctor, and they give you that extra that MRI and they tell you this is degenerative disc disease.

The one of the biggest characteristics of it is that loss of disc height so you can get it at just one level but most common levels l five s one, the very bottom disc, that one can get completely squished. And then those osteophytes on the X ray or the MRI, they’ll find those irregularities or those the bone starts to change shape. And that’s another common sign of a degenerative disc disease.

What you’ll feel on yourself is of course back pain stiffness is a common one. That’s the most common one. people wake up in the morning they just feel stiff getting out of bed. If they’re sitting around for a while their back will start to ache and then when they get up to move, they just feel like they’re stiff, they can’t move very good and they take a few minutes, sometimes longer in order to comfortably take some steps. And then in extreme cases, you can get a pinched nerve, which acts like sciatica.

Essentially it can send pain down into your leg. Sometimes it’s on the front of your legs, sometimes the back of the leg. anywhere in your leg, it can go down and below the knee even into the foot and ankle. In some cases people get plantar fasciitis symptoms. They think that They have plantar fasciitis because they’re getting pain in their heel, when in reality, it’s one of the nerves that goes to the heel that’s just been set off, but it’s actually coming from the back.

So this condition overlaps and mimics a lot of other problems like sciatica back or arthritis. But it is an accumulation of all this together. And the good news for you is this, the root problem is usually the same for all these issues, you’ve got some muscle imbalance, and that can be addressed.

We’ve got some stuck joints, those can be moved, you got some stiff muscles, those can be freed up, I think that’s the best news that you’ve got that you’ve got room for improvement, you just have to get the right kind of help the right kind of exercises and set your expectations because it’s not going to be a quick recovery by any means you’ve got some work ahead of you.

But if it improves your quality of life, even by just 20% 30% if you can get to 50%. For most people, that’s pretty darn good, especially if you can avoid some surgery, or relying on pain medications or injections. Now, I highly recommend you go check out that video that I linked in the description below that has exercises for you to start on.

We’ve also got a program called the 28 Day Back Health And Wellness Boost Program. And this is a paid program, you’ll find the link in the description below. But it is comprehensive. It’s got 28 days worth of things for you to do to improve your back. It’s not going to fix a degenerative disc disease in an instant. But if you go through this program, and you can go through it over and over again, you’ll get access for months, indefinitely at this point.

So you can take yourself through it over and over again and to work through those progressions. There’s progressions in the videos in the 28 day program where you can make them gradually harder as you can tolerate it without any pain or discomfort. And you should be able to get some serious improvement on your back problem and your degenerative disc disease issue.

I recommend that if you just can’t get to a physical therapist, especially manual therapists have specialists in your area. But the number one thing that I can recommend for you is go get professional help from the right kind of specialist that is going to expedite things and make sure that you’re guided through properly so that you have that one on one attention.

I hope this video was informative for you today. I hope that you learned a lot please give us a thumbs up like if you thought it was helpful. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel. turn on your notifications so that you don’t miss any of the helpful videos we upload every week. Have a wonderful day.