Sciatica: Rest May Not Be Best

Bed rest may not help sufferers of sciatica and other back ailments recover more quickly, new studies are showing. Dr. Emily Senay, health and medicine correspondent for CBS This Morning, reports.

The two weeks of bed rest traditionally prescribed for sciatica doesn't necessary help sufferers recover any faster than normal activity, researchers reported Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Sciatica, back pain that comes from the sciatic nerve, often starts in the lower back and radiates through the buttocks and all through the back of the legs.

Standard treatment had been bed rest. But Thursday's study indicates that such treatment may not make sciatic pain go away any faster than a continuation of normal activity.

In the study, conducted by Dr. Patrick C.A.J. Vroomen of Maastricht University Hospital in the Netherlands, half the 183 subjects were assigned to bed rest, and the other half were assigned to watchful waiting, meaning normal activity without straining the back or provoking pain.

After two weeks, 70 percent of the 92 patients who stayed in bed felt better. So did 65 percent of those who were up and about. Statistically, those are the same.

After 12 weeks, 87 percent of the patients in each group felt better.

"We found no evidence that bed rest is an effective treatment for patients with sciatica," Vroomen said.

Although this was the first such study to look specifically at sciatica, other recent studies have looked at other types of back pain and found that bed rest did little to speed healing.