In this video we're going to talk about intervertebral discs. Now it's important to understand a bit of anatomy about how your back is built to understand what these discs are and what function they play. your spine is composed of a number of vertebrae, or backbones that are placed one on top of another. They're connected a few ways. One of which is with a disc, a disc like structure that sits in between them. Now this disc plays a number of roles.

One of them is as a shock absorber for your back. And the other one is to give your back flexibility between the bones that are stacked one on top of another one or the vertebrae. There are a number of problems that can happen to these discs that might cause a number of different symptoms. There might be a traumatic event, something that pushes Down on these discs, causing them to lose their place or be pushed out or, or bulge in a certain direction. There might be degenerative changes. as people get older, these discs become less flexible, and they they use that as their function less than they did when the individual was younger.

Another degenerative change as people get older, is they might go through calcification and lose their flexibility. This can cause somebody, as it mentioned, to lose their flexibility, and this can cause damage in the future. I want to talk for a moment about herniated discs. Now, if you can picture it, each disc is kind of like a jelly doughnut with a harder exterior and a softer interior. Those are the two main parts of the disc. Now if there's a problem with the harder exterior, and the softer interior part breaks through, that's called herniation.

Bulging discs are where a disc is pulled out of its place, and presses and can go to any direction. Now, this is a very tricky concept not to understand. But to understand the correlation with back pain. There was a very big study in which a very large population had an MRI performed on them so they can see these discs and see the shape of the spine. What they found was that back pain was very weakly correlated with herniated and bulging discs. This is a very interesting finding for a number of reasons.

But let's say you suffer from back pain and you go to your doctor, and you ask them to give you an MRI, and they do. Now you're suffering from back pain, and you see that you have bulging discs in your back. It's very easy and quick to say, hey, my back pain is a result of these bulging discs. But the correlation isn't very strong, and there's a very good chance that your back pain is in fact, not a result of These bulging disc a bulging discs, but rather comes from something else, maybe a musculoskeletal pain one of the muscles are pulled strained a ligament there's a number of other other causes that can cause your back pain. But it's too easy to jump and conclude that bulging discs are the cause when it might, in fact, not B. Before we move on to the next type of pain, I want to just mention that a herniated disc can cause pain, if it protrudes backwards and pushes on the nerves of the spinal cord, or on the root nerves that are leaving the spinal cord.

Now, this can this can express itself in a number of ways, but it might express itself as leg pain, for example, on the outside of the leg. The herniated disc might cause leg pain and not pain in the back at all. So again, it's very, very tough to know even if you see a herniated disc on an MRI or on some type of imaging test that you do. It's tough to know that your back pain is a result. Have the herniated disk. Keep that in mind as you're at the doctor's trying to make the diagnosis.

I think we've talked enough about the intervertebral discs for now. In the next video we're going to talk about pain because of pressure caused on one of those nerves called the sciatic nerve.