Low Back Pain and Sciatica: Your Body Will Heal Itself If You Provide it With the Correct Conditions

The human body has an innate desire to heal itself 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, no matter what the injury. Whether you have a simple paper cut or a broken bone, your body will always strive to repair itself.

So where does the body go wrong with low back pain and sciatica? The truth is, it doesn't go wrong, it is just we do not always give it the best conditions for it to work in.

I get very frustrated with the mystique which is often created with regards to low back pain or sciatica. Ultimately, it is the same as any other injury in that if you provide your body with the correct conditions, it will strive to heal itself. That is not to say you may not need some advice with regards to the best things for you to do, but it does not mean that you need to have you low back clicked, cracked or 'put back into place'.

With regards to healing, the problem often lies within ourselves, in that we do not always give the body the correct conditions for it to heal itself. In effect, we keep interfering with our body's own healing process.

I am always using this simple analogy to highlight this point. Let's say we have just cut ourselves. The process which follows is bleeding, which gradually forms a weak scab and as time passes this scab becomes stronger and stronger while the body slowly replaces the scab itself with scar tissue... the body's wonderful healing process in action.

Now let's imagine that as soon as this scab begins to form we keep on rubbing, scratching and picking it. We all know what will happen, the cut will start bleeding again in order to form a new scab. If we keep on picking and scratching, this process will continue back and forth i.e. the body trying to heal itself by forming a scab and us interfering with the healing process by the continuing agitation of the wound. We are quite obviously interfering with the body's healing process.

Does the body give up? NO of course it doesn't, it continues relentlessly to heal itself and as soon as we leave it alone long enough, the healing process will be completed. It is for similar reasons that a wound across your elbow or one of your finger joints seems to take a lot longer to heal, due to the bending of that joint continuously interfering with the healing process.

Well a similar thing happens when we have a low back pain or sciatica, although not quite as dramatic as the open wound and significant bleeding a cut produces.

If, for whatever reason, our back/sciatic nerve is injured, the body will once again strive to heal itself. However, if we continue to place too much stress across those structures which are trying to heal themselves, it is the equivalent of scratching or picking a scab, the healing process is being interfered with. Therefore, at best the traumatised structures are going to take a lot longer to heal - at worst, the pain will continue to increase.

The beauty of the human body is that it does not give up! If we reverse this situation by not only taking these stresses away from the injured structures, but also provide them with the optimum healing conditions, the body will heal itself and your low back pain or sciatica will resolve. The important part is knowing how to best provide your body with those optimum conditions.