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1. Pain that injects from your back or neck to your hand or foot. Shooting or cutting pain is what pain from a herniation feels like. If this pain goes all the way to your hand or foot then this possibly a disc herniation. Pain that ends before crossing your knee or elbow is most likely to be referred pain.

2. Numbness or titillating in your hands or legs. When a nerve is squeezed off by a disc herniation you might sense a numb or pins-and-needles sensation in your legs, hands or feet. This sensation will be in a particular region such as the little finger and ring finger of one hand or the outside or your lower leg. Different nerve roots are responsible for sensation to particular regions of the body. You may observe that an area feels like it is "numb", such as when you sleep on your arm or sit on one leg too long. The phenomenon is the same. When you pinch off a nerve with pressure, the corresponding body part will tingling.

3. Weakness. The first two symptoms address what occurs once receptive nerves are squeezed. When motor nerves from the same nerve root are squeezed you may observe helplessness of specific muscle groups. Primary examples of this helplessness are decreases in hand grip strength or an inability to stand on your toes. Although helplessness is not the most common sign of a disc herniation it is one of the more serious ones.

4. Shifting your position makes a difference. When you are examined for back pain and your doctor wants to ascertain whether it is plausible that you have a herniation, he will try to detect positions that stretch particular nerves. When a nerve root is pinched off at the spine by a herniation and the nerve gets stretched, it will generally increase any symptoms you have (Pain, numbness, tingling, weakness, etc.) On the one hand, perhaps the only way you have found to alleviate your hand pain is to hold your hand over your head. This is a primary and often definitive sign that you have a herniated neck disc. Holding your hand above your head removes all of the tautness off of the nerves running into your hand.

5. Extremity pain may be worse than back or neck pain. When you have a disc herniation it is conceivable that you don't even have any back pain. That is partly true. Your leg or hand pain from a herniation possibly so acute that you do not observe the comparatively smaller amount of back or neck pain. Discs are pain sensitive but nerve roots are far more sensitive and normally if you have a herniation of a disc the hand or leg pain will be twice as bad.

6. The symptoms are on one side only. When a disc bulges or herniates it will typically bulge to either the left or right. Whenever you have pains down both legs or to both hands then other causes need to be looked at such as tumor, or additional disease.

7. Painfulness when you straining. You may discover that your symptoms (pain, tingling, numbness, etc.) increase if you strain when lifting a heavy load. This increases the pressure in your spinal cord and may further compress a nerve root; increased pinching leads to increased symptoms. This is a really good indicator that your trouble is a disc herniation.

Now that you understand some symptoms of disc herniation you should also know that there are lot more causes for a disc herniation. They can be induced by some traumatic force but more often they come on when you least anticipate it. Low back disc herniations can come from repeated gyration stress. For example,

if you are loading heavy boxes into the back of a truck and instead of squaring up yourself in front of a box, lifting it up and then walking to the truck, you are twisting to grab the box and then twisting to place it in the truck, you are putting your discs under an extraordinary amount of tension. One of the most stressful loads you can place on your spine is to sit slouching forward for an extended periods. Because this reason, truck drivers are particularly prone to low back disc herniations. It's also getting more and more common with people who spend lengthy periods of time in front of a computer.