“They Said I Got A Herniated Disc In My Injury Case…What Do I Need To Know?”

Want To Know Your Injury Case Value?  Calculate What Your Case Is Worth For Free...

What Is A Herniated Disc?

First thing is, what is a herniated disc? Your spine is up and down when you're walking around and it basically are your backbone. What is the backbone made of? It's made of little bony vertebrae which give your spine its strength and then in between each vertebrae there is a disc.

The disc is like a gel pack and it's a shock absorber. So when you walk around it is absorbing the shot between each vertebrae. And you've got a lot of vertebrae in your spine. It's not just one or two bones, it's like a bunch of bones all the way from the base of your neck down to your tailbone. You got vertebrae bone disc.

Blowout Of Shock Absorber

Well the disc, the shock absorber, pushes the bones apart because there's a shock absorber between them. And in that space between the vertebrae that's where all the nerves come out from your brain down out into your body. And remember your nerves basically are what make you feel and your nerves are what make you to allow you to move your body.

So the concern with a herniated disc, is a herniated disc is when you have a blowout of your shock absorber. You can think of it as like a tire or if you've ever used like a heated gel pack for a neck ache or a backache or an injury, imagine there's a tear in that thing and the gel is leaking out or there's um a leak in your tire and then it goes down. As it goes down the space between the discs reduces, and as the space between the discs reduces you can start getting your nerves pinched.

Get It Diagnosed Immediately

And the concern with a herniated disc, I always tell people if you have any concern. This is one of the reasons why I tell people. If you've been injured at work or a car accident or however and you're having bad neck or back pain, especially if it goes down your arm or down your leg, that's a sign of a pinched nerve in the space between your vertebrae where a herniated disc might be losing height and now it's pinching the nerve. So it's very important to get those diagnosed and addressed right away. We'll talk about the treatment in a minute.

You got to address them right away. Why? Because nerves are actually very delicate they're tough but if you pinch them too badly, if you sever them, if you cut them, you're in trouble. If you pinch them long enough they can start to die. You don't want to walk around with a pinched nerve for a long time, you want to get the diagnosis right away.

The Symptoms

Usually if somebody's got a herniated disc, it means they've got those ridicular symptoms. Those symptoms of either weird sensation going down their arm or their legs, or actual pain. A lot of times with a neck injury, if you have a herniated disc in your neck, it can feel like you have a shoulder injury.

You actually could literally feel no pain in your neck or minor pain in your neck like a three out of ten pain and eight out of ten pain in your shoulder. Then the doctors will give you an MRI and a bunch of tests and they'll discover that it's radicular pain or referred pain where the problem is in a blown disc in your neck but the nerve is pinching and making it feel like it's in your shoulder.

I see that all the time. A lot of times people think it might be a rotator cuff tear but it actually isn't, it's a herniated disc in their neck. So if you have a herniated disc in your neck you're at risk of one or both arms, feeling numb or having shooting pain on one or both shoulders or even down to your fingers. If you have a herniated disc in your lower back, your lumbar spine, that's when you can have hip pain, you can have leg pain, shooting down from your lower back. If you have any of those symptoms you might have a herniated disc and it is very important for you to get in to see a doctor right away.

What Are The Treatments?

What do doctors do? The first thing that they will often do if you're not having really bad symptoms of pain shooting down or numbness shooting down or loss of strength in a leg or an arm is, they will often put you into physical therapy.

Physical Therapy

Physical therapy is diagnostic and it's also curative. It's to help the doctor see what's wrong with you and it's also to make you feel better and help you heal. So sometimes physical therapy will often strengthen the surrounding muscles and over time, the herniated disc isn't pinching the nerve anymore so that's why they do it.

The other thing is, if physical therapy isn't helping at all or even makes the pain worse. You might have a herniated disc. Now when a doctor discovers that depending on your symptoms, when you first see a doctor, if the symptoms really concern the doctor he or she'll send you right for an MRI but a lot of times they'll put you in therapy first. And whether you do some therapy and it's giving you a lot of problems or whether they send you to MRI.

MRIs

The second stage of treatment for a herniated disc is going to get an MRI. And right now the MRI is the gold standard for diagnosing a herniated disc, second only to a doctor actually doing surgery on you and looking with their own eyes to see what's going on. It's the gold standard. Why? Because where x-rays only see bones or mainly just see bones or calcium deposits, MRI visualizes the soft tissue.

In other words, your discs are that soft tissue, they're not bone, they're shock absorbers. So if you have a blowout, they can they can usually see it on MRI. It's not perfect, there are often times where if you move a little bit during the MRI they can't see whether it's herniated or not or just based on where it's herniated and the position they have you on the table.

fMRIs

Another thing is, they're not popular because the insurance company shut them down. it's the fMRI. It's a functional MRI. They do an MRI while you're standing up, well why does that make sense? Why do people lay down when they have a bad neck or back? To take the weight of their head and their body off the discs. If you're lying down, the spaces open up more, if you're standing up, it shows what your spine looks like under load. And under load is the way you are when you're walking around.

A lot of people will have worse pain when they're standing up and walking around and less pain when they lay down. It makes sense to do an MRI that way but fMRI have been attacked by the insurance industry and they're rare now. There's not too many machines out there.They attack them left and right because they're better proof when people are really hurt. The insurance industry saves millions probably hundreds of millions of dollars every year by injured people not being able to definitively prove that there's an MRI or that there's nerve compression from that space between the vertebrae.

Injections

After the MRI, the next thing they'll usually do is, they'll try therapy. If they haven't already tried therapy, the next step after that, don't get me wrong, a lot of people with a herniated disc do therapy and they get better. Some of them get completely better where they have no symptoms or minor symptoms, so that's a good percentage of people. Not everybody with a herniated disc ends up with surgery.

The next step would be injections. So if they give you injections, an injection into the spot the cervical spine, the neck area or the lumbar spine or the thoracic which is the middle back. The idea in there is that, they're basically taking the pain away to let your body heal, reduce the swelling, reduce the pain, so that you can live a little bit and let your body heal.

The injections are diagnostic as well. If you've got a vertebrae really pinching a nerve, the injection might help for a day or two. If the pain comes right back, they know for sure it's a herniated disc. Sometimes an injection or a series of three injections solves the problem.  Then you don't need to go any further in treatment, you're able to return to your normal life, or return to work.

Surgeries

If that doesn't work your next step is surgery and there's a variety of surgeries. There's the discectomy where they cut some of the vertebrae out, there's the fusion cervical fusion where they put internal hardware to lift the space between the vertebrae and they fuse it there, so they're basically taking those vertebrae apart and they're not using your disc as a shock absorber, they're fusing those two levels of the spine together to make sure the nerves not getting pinched anymore. That's a very mature surgery at this point. I think they started doing that as early as the 1960s or 1970s.

So it's a very mature procedure now and it's relatively safe. It's still a spine surgery, it's still a big deal but it's not as serious and as scary as it was in the 70s or 80s. I mean even back if you talk to a retired surgeon, they'll tell you that even by the 1980s, they knew what they were doing and they were pretty good. But it is still a spine surgery, involving nerves, so you got to take doing a surgery seriously.

So that is what a herniated disc is. That is why it's important to talk to a doctor right away. That is sort of an outline of what likely treatment and what the progression of a treatment for a herniated disc is, whether it's in your neck or back.

Talk To A Lawyer As Soon As Possible

The last thing I'm going to say, it is very important to talk to a lawyer and get represented. At the early stages of a case or even the middle stages, you don't know whether the company is going to go along with the program throughout the case, whether it's going to be disputed or anything like that. You want to make sure that you have somebody on your side, making sure that you are making all the right decisions and that you're building as strong a case with as few problems as possible. Doing that is only something a lawyer can help you do.

Lawyers prefer cases early on right after the injury or close to it. But I take cases all the way, even the ones that are near the end because there are still things I can do for people to get them maximum recovery and to repair some of the damage that somebody else might have done to the case.