Sciatica
Sciatica is pain that travels along the sciatic nerve — from the lower back, through the buttock, and down the back of the leg, sometimes all the way to the foot. It is usually a symptom of something pressing on or irritating a nerve root in the lower spine, most often a bulging disc. The good news: for most people, sciatica settles with the right guided exercise and activity plan, without surgery.
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Radiculopathy
Radiculopathy is the medical word for a pinched (irritated or compressed) nerve root where it exits the spine. In plain language: a nerve leaving the backbone gets squeezed, and because that nerve travels down a limb, the symptoms travel too — shooting pain, tingling, numbness, or weakness down an arm (cervical radiculopathy) or down a leg (lumbar radiculopathy). Sciatica is the most familiar example of lumbar radiculopathy. Most radiculopathy settles with the right guided care as the irritated root calms down; a few specific patterns need faster review.
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Lumbar Canal Stenosis
Lumbar canal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal in the lower back, so the nerves travelling to the legs have less room than they should. Its most telling sign is a pattern called neurogenic claudication: the legs ache, tire, or feel heavy and numb the further you walk, and the relief comes not from stopping alone but from sitting down or leaning forward — over a shopping trolley, or up a slope. Most stenosis is age-related and manageable, but a specific set of warning signs (the cauda equina red flags) always needs emergency care.
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Degenerative Lumbar Spine
'Degenerative lumbar spine' is the umbrella term for the ordinary wear-and-tear changes of the lower back — degenerative disc disease, lumbar spondylosis, disc dehydration (desiccation), bony spurs (osteophytes), and facet-joint arthritis. Here is the single most important thing to understand: these changes are extremely common, they show up on the scans of huge numbers of people with no pain at all, and finding them on your MRI is not a sentence. Pain, when it comes, is usually manageable — and the strongest, most active version of your back is still very much available to you.
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Scoliosis
Scoliosis is a sideways (side-to-side) curve of the spine, often with a degree of rotation, so the back looks or feels uneven. There are two very different stories behind it: adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, which appears during a teenager's growth spurt, and degenerative scoliosis, which develops later in adult life as the discs and joints wear unevenly. The right response depends on which one you have, how large the curve is, and — in teenagers — how much growing is still to come. Most scoliosis is managed without surgery.
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Thoracic Back Pain
Thoracic back pain — also called dorsal pain or mid-back pain — is pain in the middle of the back, the region between the base of the neck and the bottom of the ribcage. Most of it is muscular and postural: the thoracic spine is a relatively stiff, rib-anchored region, and long hours hunched over a desk or phone load it in ways it dislikes. That kind of thoracic pain responds well to posture, mobility, and strengthening work. But there is an important caveat — new mid-back pain in an older person, or in anyone who is unwell, deserves assessment rather than assumption, because this region is also where fractures and other causes can present.
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Cervical Myelopathy
Cervical myelopathy means the spinal cord itself is being compressed in the neck — not just a nerve root. This is different from ordinary neck pain or cervical spondylosis: because the cord carries signals to the whole body below it, myelopathy is a condition that needs a spine surgeon's assessment first, not a wait-and-watch physiotherapy trial. If you notice your hands becoming clumsy, objects slipping from your grip, or your walking turning unsteady, treat it as urgent. Physiotherapy has a real role here — but as support alongside, or after, surgical decision-making, never instead of it.
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Thoracic Myelopathy
Thoracic myelopathy — also called dorsal myelopathy — is compression of the spinal cord in the mid-back (the thoracic, or dorsal, spine). Like cervical myelopathy, it is a spinal-cord problem, not a simple muscular backache: because the cord passes through this region on its way to the legs and pelvic organs, the warning signs show up as leg heaviness, an unsteady walk, a band-like tightness around the trunk, and sometimes bladder changes. This is a condition to assess with a spine surgeon first. Physiotherapy supports function around surgical care and drives recovery afterward — it is not the primary treatment for a compressed cord.
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