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Eldercare for sciatica

I will be doing a massage on an elderly lady in a nursing home to assist relieving her sciatica pain. This will be my first eldercare massage. She will most likely be in her bed, but I am bringing my chair too. Does anyone have advice for me?

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Permalink Reply by lee kalpin on November 29, 2009 at 10:57pm

My first bit of advice is that you obtain a good health history to find out what this lady's general health condition is. In addition to the sciatica, does she have health problems (such as heart, circulatory conditions). as these could present contraindications or precautions to massage. Also find out about medications. This is important for ALL clients, but elderly clients are likely to be on meds. like blood thinners, which are precautions to massage.

As for the sciatica, it just means pain the sciatic nerve. It doesn't tell you what is causing the pain. With younger people sciatica is often from pressure on the nerve under the piriformis muscle (often from too much driving or such). With older people there is often compression of the nerve where it exits the spine, resulting from disc degeneration. If that is the case, you are not likely to be able to affect it much with massage. However, you can certainly do relaxing techniques for the low back and hip, which may be helpful in relieving the pain.