https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326259.php

Huh? Actually, this is a pretty interesting article (linked to above) which is another example of how important healthy bacteria is to our health. Most of what we hear about is our gut bacteria which numerous studies have shown to be important. But whether we like it or not bacteria live pretty much everywhere in our bodies. And this story reports on a study that found that our mouth bacteria is also important. So mouthwash indiscriminately kills these bacteria causing things not to work quite as well. Similar to how antibiotics mess with our gut bacteria. So the takeaway is to be kind to your bacteria! 

Since we are seeing an uptick in sciatica patients lately I wanted to cover briefly how we treat it. We have developed our own method of treating sciatica by treating hundreds of patients with this issue over 15 years. We do 4 things that we feel are, together, an effective protocol. With acupuncture we treat the path of the pain, the lower back (whether it hurts or not) and use auricular (ear) acupuncture to also treat to root of the problem which is usually a disk issue in the L3 to L5 area of the spine. We then use cupping along the path of the pain and also in the low back area to release the muscles and reestablish proper blood flow. The results of doing these things are usually quick and effective. Most patients feel a good deal better after a couple of visits. In tough cases we will often add a favorite Chinese herbal formulation to speed up healing.