Low Back Pain and the Sacral Iliac Joints

Low Back Pain and the Sacral Iliac Joints

Transcripts:
(00:00) lower back pain and the sacroiliac joints. Your sacroiliac joints or your SI joints sit right between here, between your tailbone and your pelvis. And what it does is basically connect your hips to your spine and it helps to facilitate loading from your spine to your lower extremities. Now, when somebody comes into my office with back pain, the first place we look is the lumbar spine because that’s usually the culprit.
(00:30) But in about 20% of the cases, the SI joints can be involved either with the lumbar spine or it can be exclusively in the SI joints. Now, what we find that is that the pain when in the SI joint, it usually wraps around into the groin. And 60% of the time, it could also involve the leg as well where the pain radiates down, one of the descending nerves, into the leg itself.
(00:51) SI joint injuries are usually from axial loading, so downward pressure on the spine, and abrupt rotation or twisting. That causes a shearing stress on these joints. But it could also occur from previous lumbar fusion. It can be from an infection. It could be gait disturbances, how you walk, how you sit. All these things can play a role with these joints becoming fixated, getting inflamed and causing irritation.
(01:17) So the first place we do look with SI joint dysfunction is a leg length discrepancy. One of the legs being hiked up or lowered or higher on one side, that discrepancy. One of the legs being hiked up or lowered or higher to higher on one side, that discrepancy can correlate to what’s going on in the SI joint.
(01:32) So we do look at the SI joint, put motion in the joint, restore proper mechanics, and it starts to heal and recover and stabilize. If you’re suffering with back pain, there’s a possibility it can be your SI joint. Make sure you’re getting that checked out.