In this episode, I'm going to walk you through everything I've learned in over twenty years of treating patients with disk problems — one of the most common, and most misunderstood, causes of back and leg pain: the herniated disk. I'll cover the anatomy of the spine and why the low back is the region most likely to herniate, why the mid-back almost never does, and what's actually happening inside a disk when it bulges, protrudes, extrudes, or sequesters. I'll walk through the classic symptoms, including nerve pain that travels down the leg, and the handful of "red flag" symptoms that mean you need to go to the emergency room, not my office. I'll talk about how car accidents — especially rear-end collisions — can injure a disk through the seatbelt and the whiplash-flexion mechanism, something I see constantly in practice. And I'll go through the f ...