You hava been diagnosed with bulging disc at L3 L4 Symptomatic pain in the Femoral and Saphenous nerve area at the inner knee Is this type of pain consitent with diagnosis What is best treatment?

Answer 1

The diagnosis is the report from the Radiologist, and is just a fancy way of saying that you have a herniated disk at L3-L4, and that the disk is pressing on the nerve, causing pain down the entire nerve pathway, which ends at the inner part of your knee.

Spinal pain due to disk herniations can always be traced by following the nerve pain pathway the patient is complaining about. All spinal nerves follow a known path from the spine to different areas of the body. Knowing which nerve path is having pain tells the doctor and patient which disk/s are involved. For example, nerve pain down the back of the legs is caused by disk herniations at L5 pressing on the sciatic nerve. Herniations at the Cervical spine at C5/6/7 result in severe pain in the left arm.

As far as treatment, it depends on the nature and extent of the disk damage. Once a disk is herniated (the medical term for a bulge or rupture of the disk membrane) it will eventually retract into position with proper treatment and rest. But the disk membrane at that point will always be weak - there's no way around that and it'll be like that the rest of your life. What you CAN do is to help ensure that you don't put yourself in a position to stress that disk again, and there are a range of exercises that are available that you can ask your doctor about. Your best option for exercise is a pool - swimming/aquatic therapy is low impact and high strength and is the best for disk rehab.

The area of your body you want to strengthen are your abdominal muscles, but you also want to concentrate on flexibility. Most people exercise without proper stretching, and that usually leads to problems. You should stretch a minimum of 30-45 minutes to get any effective flexibility.

Again though, it depends on the reason for the herniation to begin with - an accident, fall, disease, etc. If you're like me and have both spinal disease and damage from other problems then you're limited to the things you can do. You do need to research why you're having disk problems and what the long term diagnosis is from your doctor. Only knowing why it happened can you determine what to do in the future. But whatever you do, do it and stick with it. After 3 major spine operations, I can honestly tell you that you don't want to go through what I have. Ever.

TSD -RAVEN- Category Supervisor