I know, I know, I’m the one who usually answers questions like that. But I don’t know. And my leg hurts exactly like sciatica, but on the front, all the way from the anterior surface of the hip joint down to my foot, out to the anterior/lateral surface of the thigh, enveloping the patella and curving around the lateral edge of my tibia on its way down.
Not asking for medical advice here, I know how to treat it (or at least how to try), I’m just curious if there’s a nerve I’m forgetting from anatomy class, or if I just have a chain of angry muscles.
I wouldn’t really call it an analog, but I could see a partial entrapment of the femoral nerve* causing that pain pattern. Or possibly radiculopathy at the L3,L4 and/or L5 level.
*Which could happen as it passes through the psoas, a muscle often forgotten in massage treatments because it’s generally unpleasant to have work done on it.
Bingo! That’s definitely it. And now that I feel for it, my psoas is tight as hell from sitting on this couch leaning forward to reach my computer on the coffee table all day yesterday.
Thanks!
Ugh, now to get my partner to jab me in the gut to release my psoas. Not fun.
No probs. You could try stretching it first out a bunch to see how much relief that gives. Remember to keep the leg fairly straight to take the quads out of the stretch.
Anterior? I thought on that end of a person, you’d use dorsal or ventral since anterior means the head end. The title made me think you were talking about arm nerves.
Anterior = front of a biped
Posterior = back of a biped
Superior = closer to the head
Inferior = closer to the feet
Dorsal = topside of an animal that spends its time horizontal, like a dog or dolphin
Ventral = underside of a horizontally oriented animal
Posterior = toward the butt of a horizontally oriented animal, also known as caudal in veterinary medicine.
Anterior = toward the nose of a horizontally oriented animal, aka rostral, cranial, or cephalic
Comparing two points on the arms can be broken down into distal (further away from the trunk) and proximal (closer to the trunk) or lateral (to the side furthest from the body) and medial (towards the body). My bicep is proximal to my thumb. My thumb (in anatomic neutral) is on the lateral side of my hand.
That sounds similar to what I’m experiencing - I have a herniated disc (I think…I put off getting the MRI results for work-related reasons), and I’m undergoing physio, but everyone basically says L4/L5, and I have numbness in my leg at specific spots that just makes the doctors and therapists nod knowingly and say “S1”. I think the psoas was the muscle my therapist stripped last week…ridiculously painful.
A dog’s scalp would be dorsal, just like ours. Anterior/posterior in vertebrate creatures reference positions relative to the direction of motion; that is, if its in the “forward” direction (relative to another point), it’s anterior. Dorsal/ventral are in relation to the spine, and superior/inferior are in relation to gravity.
For humans, since we stand upright, our “ventral” surface also happens to be in the direction of motion, thus ventral and anterior are essentially synonymous for us (except when discussing the head, since our heads are still oriented the same as most other vertebrates), and the formerly anterior positions are instead “superior”, whereas what would be posterior in a four-legged animal becomes “inferior”. Thus, my heart is superior to my abdomen, whereas in , say, a dog, the heart is anterior to the abdomen.