Sciatic nerve pain is quite painful. You may have already felt it in the past and not known exactly what it is. Sciatic nerve pain is pain that radiates from the lower back region down your legs. This type of pain feels like shooting pain, pain that is not located in one limited area but instead moves through the back, down into the buttocks and down one or more legs.

What causes this pain is a nerve, the sciatic nerve. This bunch of nerves is located at the lower base of the spinal column. It is used to provide feeling to and deliver messages from the brain to the lower extremities. Like all nerves in the body, they move through the tissue and give you feelings. These run up through the spinal column to the brain. The pain you feel is not normal, though. This pain comes from one of these nerves pinched.

If you think of the sciatic nerve as a big wire, delivering messages back and forth, consider what would happen if something pinched the wire. The outer covering rips and tears, which is not the cause of the pain. What is the cause of sciatic nerve pain is the pinching of the actual never by the vertebrae in your spinal column. The exposed wire is being pinched, causing electricity to flow out of it. Like this electrical cord, the sciatic nerve sends pain messages to the brain along the entire length of the nerve.

This is why you feel the pain radiating out, throughout your hips and down your legs. This is the path the sciatic nerve travels to. It is sending those pain signals throughout all of these regions, even though the actual cause of the pain is at the lower portion of your spinal column. Sciatic nerve pain can be relieved, especially when the pinching is relieved.

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