I wanted to take a minute to kind of show you what a disc herniation is, show you what it looks like, and then also talk a little bit about what some of those issues are that it can cause.
I got this cool model here and with this model, I can show you what the disc herniation looks like. Let me kind of walk you through what this looks like first.
Up here, we have one of the Vertebra, one of the bones, another bone down here.
This is your disc in the center here.
Then we have your spinal cord right here, and then the spinal nerves that come off right here.
When we look in the center, this is your canal, your spinal canal.
That’s where the spinal cord goes through, but when we look at the side here, you can see the spinal cord is in there and the nerves come off.
In there is where the problem arises, because when we start to have issues where the disc goes into that area, that’s where we’re going to start getting symptoms.
When we look at this and we look at this disc like this, what happens is the disc actually will herniate out just like that, as you can see, I’ll show it to you on this site, too.
It will herniate out just like that.
Now, when that disc sticks out like that, you can see how now it’s moved into that canal, and it’s putting pressure on that nerve.
When we have a herniated disc, a couple of things can happen. We can have pain right at the area of herniation because the outside of your disc has nerves there, and those nerves will be able to tell you if there’s pain there also, we can have problems right here from this nerve that’s here.
We can also have problems wherever this nerve goes, wherever that nerve goes, that nerve goes to someplace below the level.
What that means is that the disc herniation is in your neck.
That nerve is going to come out and go somewhere below.
It’s not going to cause issues up here in your head.
It can cause issues down your arm.
If it’s in your lower back, it can cause issues down your leg.
If this disc herniation is in your lower back, it can’t cause issues in your arm.
It’s really important to know, because this way, we can tell whether the disc herniation, even if it’s there.
If your issues are in your arm and this is in your low back, this herniation is not causing it.
This is why we do MRIs. We can see these herniations on the MRIs, and you can see just pressure just right there shooting that herniation out.
We want to see how big it is, where it is, what levels it’s at.
That’s what MRIs are important for and these are things that we commonly see in the office. Depending on all those things I just talked about is depending on what kind of treatment we can do, if we can do treatment, or if we needed to have surgery.
I want to go over this with you.
I got this thing, and it’s cool.
It shows those disc herniations, so I hope that makes it a little bit more clear.