From agonising back pain to intermittent fasting – Dr Jeff answers your health questions
DR Jeff Foster is The Sun on Sunday’s resident doctor and is here to help YOU.
43, splits his time between working as a GP in Leamington Spa, Warks, and running his clinic, H3 Health, which is the first of its kind in the UK to look at hormonal issues for both men and women.
See and email at [email protected].
Q) I’M a 61-year-old woman and have a trapped sciatic nerve which has been causing agonising pain down my right leg for ten years.
I had nerve-blocking injections, but they didn’t help and I’ve been told I need surgery, which has a three-year wait.
I’m taking gabapentin, which doesn’t help.
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Can you recommend a more effective alternative I could suggest to my GP?
Judith Rollo, South Yorks
A) Back pain is one of the most common problems we see in primary care.
About eight in ten people have one or more bouts of lower back pain in their lives and many never find out the cause.
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Modern lifestyles of sitting still for long periods, combined with lack of exercise and increased weight problems, have contributed to an epidemic of back pain.
In general, we treat back pain in three ways: medication, physiotherapy and lifestyle changes.
If these changes do not solve the problem, we may look to MRI scan the spine, but sometimes, even in people with no back pain, a proportion will have an abnormal scan.
So without a specific question to be asked, an MRI scan will not necessarily help.
There are various medications available, including, anti-inflammatories, paracetamol, opiates (such as co-codamol) and neuropathic medicines such as gabapentin and pregabalin.
The key to working out the best match for you will take a careful discussion with your doctor.
Q) I’M a 39-year-old man and weigh 18st. I know I need to get to a healthy weight and I am thinking of trying intermittent fasting.
Jake Morgan, Braintree, Essex
A) It’s important to stress that I’m not a weight loss specialist.
But from a weight-loss perspective, intermittent fasting is just another form of dieting that reduces the total amount you eat and will therefore lead to weight loss, which will only work in the long term if you stick to it.
Intermittent fasting has gained a lot of public awareness in recent years, and there are variations of it, such as the 5:2 diet, time-restricted diet, alternate day fasting etc.
The principles of all are that you eat less food by restricting the times you can eat, but have what you want in your allotted food window so your overall calorie consumption is less.
Over time this has a cumulative effect and your reduction in food makes you lose weight.
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There are other perceived health benefits such as improved metabolism, overall energy and the gut microbiome.
But many of these benefits have not been fully tested and further evidence is required.