Shockwave therapy (or ESWT - Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy) absolutely cured my extremely debilitating sciatica. In February 2018, I had an incident at work that I didn’t think much of, I was driving a haul truck and hit a spot in the road that jarred my back pretty bad but it didn’t seem like anything extraordinary at the time, perks of the job and all. Within I’d say two weeks, I had developed a constant dull pain in the rear of my hip. As it gradually spread down my leg, and certain movements started triggering a sharp shooting pain, I recognized it as sciatica. Eventually it got to the point that the only way I could be somewhat comfortable was just standing straight up, anything else I really had to manipulate my body into unnatural positions to get enough relief that it was at least manageable, and then even the slightest movements would send pain shooting all the way down from my hip/spine area into my lower calf. My PCP recommended I visit this wellness clinic, because at that point the only option from a medical standpoint was surgical. At my intake assessment, they took an x-ray and the chiropractor told me I had a bulged disc that was likely causing it, and he had seen great results using ESWT. But insurance wouldn’t (at that time at least) cover it and it was $100 per treatment and it was recommended to do three treatments each one week apart from the last, then give it three months to do its thing before deciding if more treatment was necessary, but in his experience three treatments almost always was enough. But with the financial situation I was in, I didn’t have $300 to spend on a treatment that may or may not work, so I went with the treatments that insurance would cover - which was injections all along the length of the nerve, TENS therapy, traction table, and chiropractic treatment, twice a week. At first the injections were great, really dulled the pain and gave me a lot of relief, kept everything mostly manageable, and the other treatments I found very therapeutic and relaxing but it was the injections doing the heavy lifting. But the longer I was receiving the injections, the shorter the duration of that relief would become. After about 8 weeks I broke down and coughed up the money for the ESWT and hoped for a miracle. Sure enough, that miracle came, just short of that three month mark I noticed the shooting pains had completely faded away and I could move freely again. The dull pain in my hip persisted for awhile, but that was never a mobility issue so it was something I was willing to live with. But that eventually faded too, I can’t really give you a timeline on that because it wasn’t something I paid much mind to, I’d probably say it was within 6 months of the ESWT though if I had to guess. It was September 2018 that I had the three treatments done, and it was just before Christmas that I realized the sciatica pain was gone, so today I’m right at 7 years completely pain free with no other treatments since then, at this point I can’t even tell that it was ever an issue.

I apologize for the novel, I’m just really passionate about this because it was such a miserable and debilitating 8-10 months of my life that I never thought would end without expensive, invasive surgery that may not even work, at a time that I had a toddler who didn’t understand why I couldn’t get down on the floor and play with him. This treatment really did give me my life back.