Thanks for reading the 38th edition of my newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research as I write a book about lumbar radicular pain! This edition, it’s my pleasure to bring you my conversation with Ash, a project manager from Chennai, India, who has a long history of back pain and sciatica but has nevertheless pursued his powerlifting goals and, to a great extent, recovered from pain. Ash is deeply insightful about his journey and about his pain. During our conversation, he told me not...

Thanks for reading the 31st edition of my sciatica newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research as I write a book about lumbar radicular pain! Hi from San Jose, California, where I’m visiting the in-laws! Here’s part two of my chat with Adam Dobson, where we discuss neuropathic pain, nerve assessment, exercise and rehab for sciatica, and more! Find part 1 here. And here’s a few links to stuff Adam mentioned during our conversation: The IASP grading system for neuropathic pain The work...

Thanks for reading the 30th edition of my sciatica newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research as I write a book about lumbar radicular pain! I must say things have been pretty quiet on the book front this week! In the time I’ve had to work on it, I’ve mostly just been wading through the literature. It seems like on any topic there’s really only a few key papers that give you most of what you need. But you have to read all of them to find out which are the key ones! It’s slow going at...

Thanks for reading the 25th edition of my sciatica newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research as I write a book about lumbar radicular pain! This week I spoke to Kate Charlton again! When we spoke last year, she was recovering from her second bout of radicular pain, getting back into her training and everything was going well. Since then, Kate’s pain returned. She chose to have surgery and so far, her recovery is going really well. In the podcast, we talk about: Her decision to have...

Thanks for reading the 19th edition of my sciatica newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research into all things lumbar radicular pain! This week I spoke to Professor Raymond Ostelo! Raymond recently published a fantastic review of the evidence behind the treatment options for sciatica (link should be open access). In our conversation, we talk about the evidence behind the conclusions of his review. I ask Raymond about: How much confidence we should have in the evidence around...

Thanks for reading the 15th edition of my sciatica newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research into all things lumbar radicular pain! For this week’s podcast I spoke to Mark Laslett! Here’s the timestamps for our conversation, with some links to one or two papers Mark mentions: 1:38: On somatic referred pain. 2:40: “Do you have a theory of what's going on when someone has radicular pain but their MRI does not show anything to explain it?” 7:11: “Does largely compressive radicular pain...

Thanks for reading the 13th edition of my sciatica newsletter. This newsletter tracks my research into all things lumbar radicular pain! Today I was up bright and early to attend Annina Schmid's online course on assessment of entrapment neuropathies. Annina was kind enough to talk with me afterwards for a podcast! Our conversation mostly focused on the mechanisms underlying radicular pain. Below are the timestamps for the Q&A, with some relevant pictures and links. (Please by aware if...

This week I’m talking to Giacomo Carta. Giacomo is a basic science researcher in neuromechanics, neurorepair and neuroplasticity. He’s also a physical therapist! We discussed his research and his hopes for the future of neurodynamics, nerve pain treatment and physiotherapy in general. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Tom Get on the email list at tomjesson.substack.com

This week's podcast is a Sciatica Story with Drew Jordan Drew got sciatica about one year ago. He was on holiday and tried surfing for the first time which seems to have triggered it, and he spent a lot of time sitting which seemed to make it worse. After one or two false starts and misdiagnoses, he found out what was causing the pain, found a physical therapist who helped him a lot, and started making progress with his pain. He recently made a video on youtube explaining his approach and...

I haven’t been able to record an interview this week, so for this episode of The Sciatica Podcast I’m trying something a bit different. This is an audio version of a post of mine from 2018, Wired Into Pain: a history of the science of pain. I hope you enjoy it. Please consider sharing if you do! You can read the original post here. Tom Get on the email list at tomjesson.substack.com

Welcome to the eighth edition of my sciatica newsletter! This week’s podcast In this week’s podcast, I talk to Michelle Angus. Michelle is a consultant physiotherapist working for the Complex Spinal Team in the Emergency Village of a tertiary spinal referral centre at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust. In this podcast, she tells me about: Managing radicular pain in the ED Spinal injections Spinal surgery Medications for radicular pain And much more! So long, gabapentinoids? In the...

Hi and welcome to the seventh edition of my sciatica newsletter! This week's conversation is with Kate Charlton, a physiotherapist and triathlete from Northumberland, England. Kate has had two nasty episodes of sciatica and in this podcast she tells me about what it was like, what did and didn't work for her, and how she graded her return to sport. Our conversation will be a good resource to give to any of your patients who have radicular pain and train and compete at a high level. We...

Hello and welcome to the sixth copy of the newsletter! In my TherapyLive talk I pitched that when we treat radicular pain we should think in terms of nerve health and sensitivity rather than nerve compression (although the former includes the latter!). To illustrate what I mean by "nerve health" I showed pictures from a study by Albrecht et al. in which the authors image neuroinflammation in people with chronic radicular pain. The first picture is cool but not unexpected: the green arrow...

Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifth copy of the newsletter. I was delighted to speak with David Butler a couple of weeks ago about nerve root pain. With his permission, I recorded our chat so everyone could listen. And then I realised I’d started a podcast! I’ve avoided the temptation to give it a cringey pun title and just gone with “The Sciatica Podcast”. This will be the first of many episodes. I’ll be speaking with experts in the field and people with sciatica. And I think it would...