Herniated Disk: Everything You Need To Know To Get Better Without Surgery

A herniated disk diagnosis from your doctor might be the reason for your chronic lower back pain. Although less than 10% of cases actually need surgery for herniated disc, you want to make sure you stay on the other side of that number in the 90%. And more importantly, you need to understand what’s happening inside your lower back so that you can get better and avoid surgery the rest of your life.

In this video, I’m going to explain to you everything that you need to know to heal naturally and avoid surgery. If you’re suffering from a herniated disc in your lower back, I’ll also explain the differences between a herniated disc and other disk problems like a bulging disc or a degenerative disc disease.

For instance, I get a lot of questions about those, be sure to watch to the end so that you don’t miss a thing about how to heal your disc naturally. So let’s first answer the question of what is a herniated disc. So I’ve got a skeleton here showing the lower back and all the vertebrae or the bones here in the back are sandwiching the discs in between the vertebrae you have spinal discs, those discs act almost exactly like a spring would act.

Now I’ve taken apart a retractable pin to show you the spring here that’s inside. And you can see when I move the spring right there, how I can put pressure on it and it it gets squashed. And the spring wants to push back up. That’s exactly what a disk does in the spine. And you can also see how if I bend the spring, how it comes back to its original position once I take pressure off. That’s also how the disc in the spine works.

Now what isn’t good for a disc is twisting just like it is for a spring. If I twist, this spring, it’s going to unravel and break on itself. It’s going to fold on itself. Did springs are not designed to be twisted. They’re designed to do every other motion, except twisting. And I just ruined this pen now unless I can find another spring. But that’s the basic idea of a disc.

Now when we talk about a herniated disc, just like in this spring right here, there’s now it’s bent wrong and it’s misshapen. That’s what’s happening. In a disc of the spine, there’s been some bad forces usually twisting forces just like I did to that spring, and it’s causing a piece of the disc usually somewhere in this area to bulge out or to pop out or to herniate her and herniations when something pops out. And it’s not in the place where it’s supposed to be anymore.

Now about all those different terms a lot of people will say a slipped disc a bulging disc, degenerative disc disease, let me just give you a quick synopsis of those degenerative disc disease is not the same thing as a herniation. In degenerative disc disease, the disc is losing height, it’s getting squashed down and is permanently stained that way.

Now that has the same root problem as a herniated disc. I’ll talk more about the root problem towards the end of this video. But you just need to understand that there isn’t always going to be a disc herniation in degenerative disc disease, but you can have a disc herniation in degenerative disc disease.

It is complicated, and it’s definitely hairsplitting when it comes to the medical field diagnosing and defining disc problems and there’s reasons for it. But if you’re new to this, if you’re learning this, what you need to know is they’re all disc damage, that’s all that it is. Now a bulging disc is the same thing as a herniated disc, it means it’s just popping out from the place where it’s supposed to be.

Now for a slip disc is a misnomer. In other words, it’s not named properly because if you call it a slip disc, you would think that it just slips out of place and you could slip it back in. But that’s not the way that it works because of how well connected the disc is to the bone of the vertebrae here. There are fibers or there’s pieces of tissue that connect it extremely well. And it’s not loose in there, like it just slips around loosely, that’s not the way that the body works there.

So the term slipped disc is kind of being phased out overall, but you still hear some medical professionals say it out there. But it is not a good way of describing what happens in the spine and what happens in the discs when they become injured. Another term that you might hear is a disc extrusion or an extruded disc. And that just means that the herniation on the disk has kind of opened up and the fluid the gel like fluid and when I say fluid, it’s like really, really thick gel.

It’s not like a liquidity fluid that just flows out of the disk it kind of slowly, very, very slowly comes out I mean even thicker than molasses. And so it doesn’t just easily pop out like a pimple or like a water balloon.

That’s not how that works either lot of people have wrong thinking that’s put in their head by doctors and other health care providers because of the words they use. But you need to understand that when the nucleus pulposus, the center of the disk of a jelly like fluid, which jelly also is just not a good word for this, it starts to come out of where it’s supposed to be. And that can be dangerous.

Now, that’s extremely rare. And that only happens if you don’t get that under control. And like I said, it’s really that 10% or less of people that actually need to have a surgery done for it. If you have an extruded disc, you may or may not need surgery, but it’s a sign that your your problem is really, really bad, and you need to fix that problem.

Now herniated disk might happen alongside other back problems, like lower back arthritis and stenosis of the lower back. Now, let me tell you how a disc herniation happens in the spine. Now we’ll go back to that spring example, you remember, the disc can be squeezed this way it can be bent to the sides in every direction.

But it cannot be twisted, it’s not designed to take twisting forces in the muscles that surround the lower back here. If you think about the skeleton here, in this area right here, there’s just five bones, you have all these ribs up here. And then you have these big thick pelvis bones down here.

So you get a lot of stability in the ribs and a lot of stability in the pelvis. But the stability here in the lower back must come from these thick bones and discs, the discs provide a lot of stability, as well as the muscles. Now the muscles are what greatly influence the way the forces are distributed or spread out throughout the bones and the discs of the spine here.

So if you have an imbalance of the muscles in this area, then you can begin to put bad forces and appropriate forces through the spine. And then it’s just a matter of something starting to tear or break or herniate. There’s injuries that occur at that point when a disc herniates. It’s because it’s been taking twisting forces for much too long.

 And that twisting force has now created an injury because the discs are springy, and they’re not designed to take any sort of twisting motions. And now just to give you because those of you out there that are thinking, well, it’s not spring shaped.

If you look at the molecular structure of the rings that make up the annulus fibrosis, which is the outer part of the ring, their orientation, or the angle that the fibers are at, they are designed like a spring and they’re designed to take forces just like a spring would take except for twisting for rotational forces.

So they very much behave like springs, these discs so in the in the muscle imbalance, you typically have back muscles on the back of the spine that are too strong abdominal muscles on the front that are that are right here and they connect to the spine, those often get weak. And when that imbalance happens, the abdominals cannot limit the amount of rotation that the spine goes through, which then puts the spine through too much rotation, then the discs become injured.

And you can test this theory real quick on yourself if you just sit comfortably somewhere, and then relax your abs because you’re going to take your abs out of this. And with that as long as your back’s not going to hurt doing this because if you have a disc herniation This might hurt you. Then twist as far as you comfortably can get to the end, you know without causing any pain. And notice how far you’re looking when you twist, do the same thing to the other side.

Next, tighten your abs sucking your abs here so that they’re engaged and twist again and you’ll find that you can’t twist as far or as easily your abs stop you from twisting very much. That’s why the ads are so important to protect the discs in the spine because they don’t allow the discs to go through the end range rotation which is what damages them over time and causes those herniations now here’s more fuel for that argument.

The back muscles, the ones that go up and down the back here tend to be dominant in their primary actions are extension to lean backwards, side bending and rotation. When they fire on one side they can create twisting. So if you’re predominantly using your back muscles and not using your abdominals very well because they’re weak, then you’re putting a lot of compression forces through your spine through your through your discs, and then you’re putting a lot of rotational forces to your disk as well. So it’s the recipe for a disc herniation.

Now let’s talk about how to diagnose the problem. Usually you’ll get an MRI, you would have had back pain that sent you to the doctor the doctor might end up ordering an MRI at some points and on the MRI they’ll find that you have disc herniations because the MRI can see the discs and the nerves around the disc Pretty well, at that point, the doctor might be giving you a surgical consult. In other words, you might be going off to talk to a surgeon, if they aren’t already a surgeon themselves.

And the surgeon is going to talk to you about the treatment options as far as surgery or other options for your disc herniation. But if you haven’t had an MRI, then the symptoms that you’ll find yourself having are going to be a dull, achy pain. That’s usually in a band across your lower back. It’s not always on one side, it’s more kind of even a band is how people describe it. Like it’s, it’s all the way across.

And to show myself they’ll go like this, yeah, hurts like all this right here. And it’s it can happen to where it hurts on one side will they’ll say at hurts more on my left, or more on my right. But they’ll have the experience more often where the pain changes location, but generally it’s in that banded area, they’ll say, yeah, one day, it’s more on the left. And then you know, a few days later, it’s switched over to the right.

Today, it’s kind of evenly across. That’s a description, a classic description of having a disc herniation and the other the muscle imbalance that’s associated with it. They’ll also have tightness in those back muscles because they’re overusing them. So those muscles, they start to get tight and overworked. And sometimes they’ll have sharp pain in the back area. And that’s usually because a nerve can get a little bit pinched, or the joints here in the back also get compressed and pinched.

And that can be very painful. And on one side, if that’s the case, people will often say, yeah, kind of has a dull ache and hurts all around here. But there’s a spot right there, they’ll point with one finger. And they’ll say that that’s a painful spot, that’s usually a joint that’s kind of stuck in the area. And it’s a consequence of this muscle imbalance as well.

Now in severe cases, if that this creates quite a bit, it can herniate and push into the nerve root that’s right here coming out of the spine. And it can happen at any level. Most commonly it happens at the wave bottom, the bottom most disc, and then the next most common is the disc right above it and up from there.

But when it pinches the nerve right there, this nerve, all of these nerves actually send nerves down into the leg and it helps to control the muscles of the leg sensation for the legs. So people will begin to complain of sciatica like symptoms, they’ll say that they have pain, numbness, tingling, and even weakness that goes into their leg.

It’s usually one sided, but it can happen on both sides of the same time. And it can even happen to where it affects one leg one day, and then the other leg the other day, and it affects it differently, the pink and kind of move around and change based on how the nerve is being compressed. And you know what, when it comes to a disc herniation there may be days or times during the day where you feel nothing where your back feels, okay? It’s strange.

Some people will say I have that constant, dull achiness that’ll go come on for a few days, especially after they do something that aggravates it, like if they’re bent over for a long period of time gardening is a common one other household chores are doing certain exercises in the gym can set it off.

But then once it kind of flares down, then they’re good. They’re good for a few days, maybe even a few weeks depending on how severe the problem is. That is a common experience when it comes to disc herniations. Now, let me tell you the common treatments done by healthcare professionals for herniated discs, the number one thing that they’ll start to tell you is if you’re exercising or if you’re a very active person, they’ll tell you to rest.

Don’t do that thing that sets off your back problem that sets off your back pain and aggravates your disk. So stop lifting weights, stop running, stop riding the bike, stop gardening, stop doing those chores, and it will tend to feel better because you’re not doing an aggravating activity. But the problem is once you get back to that activity, it’s probably going to bother you again.

So you have to fix the underlying root problem so that you can live life normally and do the things that you love to do. Other things will tell you our pain relieving activities like putting on ice or heat or pain creams on your back. And of course those just take away the pain temporarily. The doctor might tell you to take over the counter pain medications or they might prescribe you prescription strength pain medication to help them with the pain so that you might sleep at night.

Very often people have pain turning in bed at night and that wakes them up. You know if you have to change from lying on one side to the other roll over onto your back. It can be painful if the disc is injured because it’s aggravated when it’s twisted.

Sometimes healthcare professionals will tell you to do certain exercises or stretches and those can be beneficial if you’re doing the right exercises at the right time because it is possible to do the right exercises for a disc herniation but done too soon, they’re done at the wrong time and they can actually hurt your back more.

If the pain continues. After you’ve tried all those things. Then the doctor might recommend doing an injection for your back and they’ll go in and inject the area with a pain medication and an anti inflammatory usually, a cortisone steroid shot is what they recommend. And that can bring the inflammation down and reduce the pain for a while if it’s going to affect it, sometimes it doesn’t have an effect.

And it can last anywhere from a few weeks to even a few months. And again, it doesn’t fix the root muscle imbalances and fix the problem. It just is pain medication that’s given to the area in a focused way. If your surgeon finds that you might be a surgical candidate, then they’re going to recommend a few surgeries.

The first one that they’ll probably recommend is what’s called the discectomy procedure. And that’s the one that they say is a minimally invasive procedure, which I think is a misnomer to because, in my opinion, any surgery is invasive, whether it’s minimally or, or not. But what they do is they’ll go in through the back and they usually make a tiny incision and they cover it up with a bandaid when they’re done.

That’s why they call it a minimally invasive procedure, you’re out the same day, they’ll go in to the disk of the spine will come in from the back and look going on the disk right here and clip the part of the disk that’s herniated that procedure, the disc hernia, the discectomy surgery, is being researched currently, and some of the research has come out they’re finding that people that have the diskectomy surgery, rehabilitate the same whether they’ve had the surgery or not.

They’ve actually done placebo surgeries or fake surgeries where they’ve gone in made the holes put the person under anesthesia. And after in some people, they actually click the disk, they do the real diskectomy procedure and others they don’t they leave the disk alone, but they still have the holes, they still went under anesthesia, everything else was accounted for.

And it’s crazy the findings that are coming out, they’re finding that everybody whether they actually had a real diskectomy or a fake diskectomy procedure, they’re all getting better the same. So they’re questioning now, if a diskectomy surgery is actually beneficial or not. And I would go to the extent to say no, I don’t think it’s beneficial, because they’re taking chunks of your disk out and even though it’s herniated, it might still be useful for protecting you from further problems later on, like arthritis in your back or stenosis.

Now if it’s pushing on the nerve and causing your leg to not work right, or causing other more serious problems, like impeding your bowel and bladder function, because that’s a possibility, then absolutely, the more important thing is to preserve your leg function, and your bowel and bladder function, your ability to go to the bathroom.

But if it’s not impeding that, you might be able to use that disk tissue. Still, another surgery that they might offer you is a disc replacement procedure where they’ll go in and put in an artificial disc. And then there’s a fusion, where they’ll connect two bones together two vertebrae together using rods and screws, that’s quite invasive, and you’re not ever going to move in that area again. And the idea is that no movement now protects the disc, which is the root problem.

But you want to accomplish that with your own muscles and not have to resort to getting surgically fixated, so that your disc is not moving anymore, because rods and screws are holding it in position. You know, along the way, seeing the doctor, they might recommend you go to physical therapy for this problem. And physical therapists are generally great at what they do, especially with helping people right after a surgery.

Like if you’ve had a back fusion, like I just talked about, or some other surgery, like a hip replacement or a knee replacement, they’re excellent at getting your mobility back, getting you back up and moving again. But what they’re not always great at is fixing the underlying root problem because that’s a specialist physical therapist that usually does that.

And that’s like what I do. So physical therapists and other healthcare professionals have great intent to help you out. If you come to them with a disc herniation problem and not had surgery yet. What they’ll likely have you do though, is strengthen your back muscles. And that feeds into the root problem. And unknowingly they might be making your problem worse.

By doing that, we often get patients here in the clinic that have gone to other physical therapy places and have done back exercises and the ones that they’ll commonly do. Here’s an example of one it’s called the bird dog, they’ll have you raised one leg and then raise the opposite hand. They might have you hold it or do repetitions, alternating sides, like so. Or they may have you do press ups like this.

They call this a cobra stretch or a Superman exercise to where you’re picking up your legs and your arms at the same time. Even standing versions of this where you might put your hands on your hips and lean backwards repeatedly.

These kinds of exercises all make you use those back muscles that produce more compression in the area and strengthen the ability of the spinal muscles to rotate your spine, which is the root problem that’s creating a herniated disc and it may not hurt right then and there in the moment.

In fact getting some movement to the area I feel better at the moment, you might feel a little looser afterwards. But as you continue to get the muscle stronger and stronger as the weeks go by, and as the months go by, it’s only going to compress the disk more and potentially worsen your disc herniation.

So now this brings me to the root problem, I need to just pound this into you right now, because you need to take this home, disc herniations can heal, if you take the pressure off the spine and you take the pressure off the spine, by getting stronger abdominals that strengthen your abdominals allows your back muscles to not have to work so hard. So that allows the back muscles to kind of give up some of their stabilization efforts.

Once they start to release a bit more. Now you take pressure off the discs, pressure off the low back pressure off the nerves. And then as the abdominals work better remember that thing we did the beginning where you twist, they prevent they if you tighten up your abs, you can’t twist as much so they prevent twisting in your spine excessive twisting, this root imbalance that I’m talking about is the root muscle imbalance for a lot of other back problems like stenosis and degenerative disc disease, like pinched nerves in the back. It’s the root problem for arthritis in your lower back as well.

So it’s just a matter of what’s the first thing to break or what are you genetically susceptible to are you the type of person that is going to get arthritis first or that’s going to hurt you to disk first. There’s other factors involved like the shape of your body. Usually, if you’re more pear shaped, if you have wider hips, and you have a smaller waist.

Usually if you’re more pear shaped like you have wider hips, and a smaller waist, that’s going to set you up for a disc problem more likely, but not always, there’s people that are more straight in their body that still get disc herniations it depends on the activities that you do.

There’s a lot of different factors. But either way that root muscle imbalance is consistently present when I find somebody here in my clinic with a disc herniation problem. And I’m going to playlist below here in the description that is herniated disk help. So all our videos relating to herniated discs are found in that playlist.

Go check that out if you’re looking for even more like exercise and tips and other information for helping your herniated disc. They’ve also got a program that you can go through it’s called the 28 day back health and wellness boosts program. That program is focused on addressing the root muscle imbalance so that you can take that pressure off your herniated disc and allow it to begin to heal naturally so that you can get back to doing all the things you love.

You can learn more about that program down in the description below. Hope this video was helpful for you if you thought it was find somebody that you can share it with that also has a herniated disc problem or might so that they can benefit from this too. Hey, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe and turn on your notifications so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every week. I’ll see you in the next video.