How Can We Help You Resolve your Pain in the Butt??
By Physio, Sam McLaren
Have you ever felt a pain right smack bang deep in your buttock and not known what it is?
Because it often feels right in the fleshy muscle you may try to stretch it out, roll over a spiky ball or get someone to stick their elbow in there! But where do you go to if that doesn’t work, or at worse irritates it?
Regular pain with sitting, physical activity and at night can really be a pain in the butt!
The posterior pelvis (your “butt”) is actually a fairly complicated area anatomically with a wide range of possible pain drivers, both locally in the area you might feel pain and also further a field that might refer pain. Due to that complexity, some health professionals may try to simplify your problem and blame your glutes as being ‘underactive’ or ‘overactive’. Whilst this could very well be true, it is important to get a good understanding of what is actually going on.
How do we understand what is causing your pain?
By asking lots of questions of course!
As a Physio, we gain a lot of information about asking about the exact location and nature of your pain; associated symptoms; activities or positions that makes it angrier (aggravating factors) or happier (easing factors); how the pain came on; how it acts over the course of the day and night plus much more. This helps us form a few likely diagnoses that we can then confirm/disprove with clinical physical testing.
For instance if:
● You get pain in your buttock that also radiates down past your knee
● Intermittent foot numbness
● Aggravated by repeated bending and lifting
Then your physiotherapist would likely want to rule out that your buttock pain isn’t originating from your lumbar spine (low back).
General sources of buttock pain may also include:
-the lumbar spine,
-the sacroiliac joint (SIJ),
-the hip joint,
-various soft tissues including muscles, tendons, ligaments, bursa,
-the bone itself (e.g. stress reactions or stress fractures)
-and other more systemic pathologies.
With a specific diagnosis, we can treat you much more specifically both from a manual therapy and exercise prescription perspective, leading to positive, long term change – so you can get on with living without pain.
If you have buttock pain that isn’t resolving do not hesitate to have it assessed thoroughly by our any one of our Physio’s – book in online or call us on (07) 5500 6470.
