The treatment of the herniated disc is highly dependent on the severity of the symptoms and the subjective symptoms and duration of illness. With a bulging with mild discomfort, conservative treatment with medication and physiotherapy exercises enough. Only with longer symptoms of more than 6 weeks, or if there is no improvement with conservative treatment, surgery is performed. This also happens with high subjective distress by the herniated disc.

Conservative therapy

A disc bulge is formed, as long as no fibres are finally enters the spinal canal, sometimes spontaneously. A functional release, for example by bed rest on a firm surface with hips and knees bent (stages bed storage) is only set once. The focus initially is a correction of the reflex tension of the back muscles in the affected segment, in order to break the vicious cycle of additional stress on the joints and other pains.

In addition to drug therapy, a pain physiotherapy support is useful. As soothing local application of heat is often perceived by mud (mudpacks) or a targeted heating of body tissue by short-wave therapy (diathermy). A massage is also quite helpful, but this therapy should gain in pain during the massage to be terminated since the spine instabilities amplify the nerve pinch.

Following a strengthening the back and abdominal muscles will be set to prevent a renewed poor posture or improper loading in this area. It makes sense this is an outpatient implementation of physiotherapy. In part, nursing reasons or personal effort and a hospitalization during therapy makes sense. After the initial treatment, the exercises shown should be carried out at home, in order to prevent a new disc problem. Prevention among other exercises are shown which are useful suitable for the prevention of first or renewed herniated discs.

Surgical treatment

Surgical treatment should be carried out carefully considered, since an elaborate disc surgery always involves an additional risk for the patient. Therefore, conservative treatment should be performed if possible first. The results of disc surgery are still very good and exceed the long-term results of conservative therapy. After surgery, about 80% of patients are symptom-free. Only in 5% of patients experience after surgery again on intervertebral discs in the operational area.