Why Most Women Who Had Hysterectomy Are Being Told They Have Sciatica

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🚨 Breaking: Women's Health Research Reveals Why Post-Hysterectomy Back Pain Is Almost Always Misdiagnosed

Why Most Women Who Had a Hysterectomy Are Still Being Told They Have Sciatica

And why everything you have been given for the pain was never going to work.

Dr. Karen Whitfield, MD

Dr. Sarah Mitchell, PhD

Director of Women's Musculoskeletal Health

In 22 years of clinical practice, I have seen one pattern repeat itself more than any other.

A woman comes in with deep, persistent lower back pain. She has had the pain for months.

Often years. She has been told it is sciatica.

She has been given nerve medication, referred to physical therapy, and given cortisone injections. Nothing has resolved it.

I ask when the pain started.

Every time, after a pause, she says:

"Around the time I had my hysterectomy. But my doctors do not think those two things are related."

They are related. They have always been related. And the reason women like her spend years without answers is not that their pain is mysterious.

It is that the medical system was never trained to see the specific way a hysterectomy damages the tendons of the lower back.

Linda is one of those women.

She is 57. She had her hysterectomy at 52. By 54, the back pain had become a constant presence she had stopped expecting to explain. By 57, she had three years of failed treatments behind her and had started to quietly accept that this was simply her life now.

She is not unusual. She is, in my experience, the rule.

What happened next matters. Not because it is a miracle. But because once you understand what was actually wrong, the path forward is obvious.

This is Linda's story, in her own words.

in linda's words

I had my hysterectomy at 52.

My surgeon told me recovery would take six weeks. He said I would feel like myself again by the end of the summer.

I trusted him. He had done this surgery hundreds of times.

Six weeks came and went. The surgical recovery went fine. But something else was happening that nobody warned me about.

About eighteen months after my surgery, a deep ache settled into my lower back. Not sharp. Not dramatic.

Just a constant, heavy pressure that was there when I woke up, was there through the day, and was still there when I finally got into bed at night.

I waited for it to pass. It did not pass.

I made an appointment with my GP.

She ordered an X-ray. The X-ray showed nothing significant. She said it was likely sciatica, probably aggravated by the surgery and the long recovery period.

She prescribed naproxen and recommended I see a physical therapist.

I did both. I went to PT for four months. I did every exercise my therapist gave me. I took the naproxen until my stomach started bothering me.

The pain did not improve.

I went back to my GP. She referred me to an orthopedic specialist.

The orthopedist ordered an MRI. The MRI showed "mild disc changes consistent with age" and nothing else notable. He confirmed the sciatica diagnosis.

He prescribed gabapentin for the nerve pain and suggested I try a different physical therapist, one who specialized in back rehabilitation.

I asked him whether any of this could be connected to my hysterectomy.

He paused. Then he said:

"Hysterectomies can cause some hormonal changes, but lower back pain is not a recognized complication. You may be experiencing some referred discomfort from the pelvic region, but the imaging does not support that."

I left with a new prescription and the same pain.

"I remember sitting in the car in the parking garage for a few minutes before driving home. I was not crying. I was just very tired."

The gabapentin made me foggy. I stopped taking it after six weeks because I could not think clearly at work.

The second round of PT helped slightly more than the first.

Then the improvement plateaued. And then quietly disappeared.

I was 55 by then. Two and a half years of appointments, prescriptions, and exercises.

The pain was exactly where it had been when this started.

I had started to do what women in this situation eventually learn to do.

I had started to organize my life around the pain instead of trying to fix it.

I stopped accepting invitations that involved long drives.

I stopped volunteering for things that required me to be on my feet for hours.

I turned down a week-long trip with my sister that I had been planning for two years because I genuinely did not know if I could manage the travel and the walking.

It was not a scheduling conflict.

the night i found the forum

It was a Wednesday night in February. I could not sleep because I had spent most of the evening sitting at a dinner table and my lower back had been aching since I got home.

I was on my phone, half-reading articles about sciatica I had already read a dozen times, when I ended up in a thread on a women's health forum.

The thread was titled:

"Anyone else have back pain that started after hysterectomy and never got better?"

I read every reply.

The women in that thread described my situation with an accuracy that felt almost unsettling.

The deep ache. The morning stiffness that took half an hour to loosen up.

The pain that got worse the longer they sat. The X-rays that showed nothing. The doctors who kept saying sciatica.

The PT that helped a little and then stopped helping.

The nerve medications that did nothing for the actual pain.

And almost all of them had one thing in common with me.

They had all had hysterectomies.

One woman wrote something that I have thought about many times since.

"The doctors keep treating us like we have sciatica because that is the closest label they have. But sciatica is a nerve problem. What we have is a tendon problem. And no one prepared us for that because no one prepared themselves."

A tendon problem.

I had never heard it described that way.

what the forum explained that no doctor ever had

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Over the following days, I read everything I could find on what that thread had introduced me to: the connection between a hysterectomy and lumbar tendon degeneration.

Here is what I learned, and what I wish someone had told me five years earlier.

Estrogen is not just a reproductive hormone. Among its many functions, estrogen is the primary signal that tells your body to produce collagen.

Collagen is the structural protein that keeps your tendons strong, flexible, and capable of repairing themselves after daily use.

In natural menopause, estrogen declines gradually over years. The tendons lose some of their repair capacity, but the decline is slow.

In a surgical hysterectomy, estrogen crashes within days of the operation. Not gradually. Quickly. And when it does, the tendons lose their repair signal almost immediately.

This is what happens to the lumbar tendons when that signal disappears:

Collagen production shuts down. The tendons stop receiving the building material they need. They begin to thin. Without fresh collagen, small damage from ordinary movement accumulates faster than the tissue can repair it.

The tendons stiffen and weaken. Without new collagen arriving, the tendons lose their flexibility. Stiff tendons become brittle. They cannot absorb the load of everyday movement the way they once could. Sitting for an hour, bending forward to the dishwasher, getting out of a chair quickly: all of these start to cause pain that was never there before.

The existing collagen begins to break down. The fibers that are already in the tendon start to lose their alignment, like the strands of a rope pulling apart from each other. The tendon loses its structural integrity. The lower back becomes unstable. And that instability creates the deep, relentless ache that never fully resolves.

The medical term for this is lumbar tendinopathy. The progressive breakdown of the tendons that stabilize your lower back and connect your muscles to your spine.

It is not sciatica. Sciatica is a nerve condition. It produces shooting or burning pain that travels down the leg, past the knee, often with numbness or tingling.

Lumbar tendinopathy produces a deep, concentrated ache in the lower back itself. It gets worse the longer you sit. It does not travel down the leg.

There is no numbness. No tingling.

I read that last description three times.

No numbness. No tingling. Deep concentrated ache. Worse with sitting. Does not travel down the leg.

That was my pain. Exactly my pain. Word for word.

I had never had the shooting nerve pain. I had never had the tingling into my legs. I had told three different doctors this. All three had still diagnosed sciatica.

why did nothing i was given have any chance of working

Understanding that I had a tendon problem rather than a nerve problem explained, in one clean sweep, why every treatment I had been given had failed.

Naproxen and painkillers: They mask the pain signal. The tendons continue degenerating underneath. When the medication wears off, the pain comes back in exactly the same place because nothing in the tissue has changed.

Gabapentin: A nerve pain medication. My nerves were not the problem. My tendons were. I was treating a condition I did not have, which is why it produced nothing but side effects.

Cortisone injections: They reduce inflammation temporarily. But research shows that repeated cortisone can actually weaken tendon tissue over time. And even at their best, they address the inflammation sitting on top of the structural breakdown, not the structural breakdown itself.

Physical therapy: PT strengthens the muscles around the damaged tendons. But you cannot strengthen a tendon that is actively degenerating from the inside. Without collagen repair happening at the cellular level, PT is loading damaged tissue with more pressure. More load on something that cannot recover from what it is already carrying.

"I had been given four different treatments for a condition I did not have. The condition I actually had, no one had ever named."

what actually repairs a degenerating tendon

By this point I had a clear picture of the problem. What I did not have was a solution.

The forum pointed toward a few directions. Collagen supplements came up repeatedly.

I tried two different ones over the following months. I felt no meaningful difference. I later read something that explained why:

Oral collagen supplements are broken down by digestion into basic amino acids before they reach your tendons.

The amino acids enter the general circulation. The body uses them wherever it decides they are most needed.

Almost none of it reaches the lumbar tendons, and even if it did, the cellular machinery that would use it to rebuild has been shut down since estrogen dropped.

So the question I kept returning to was a simple one.

How do you deliver a repair signal directly to the tendons, without it being intercepted, broken down, or rerouted somewhere else?

The answer I eventually found was not a supplement.

It was light.

Specifically, a class of therapeutic light called photobiomodulation, or red and near-infrared light therapy.

At specific wavelengths, delivered at the right intensity, light passes through the skin and stimulates the mitochondria inside cells.

Mitochondria are the internal power sources of your cells. When they receive the right light signal, they produce more cellular energy.

And with that energy, tendon cells can restart the collagen production process that estrogen used to drive.

No digestion. No rerouting. The light reaches the tissue directly, through the skin, at the exact location where the breakdown is happening.

I had heard of red light therapy before, in the context of skincare. But the application to deep tendon tissue was something I had not known about.

And I found that most consumer red light devices are designed for surface use. They use a single wavelength at low intensity. They do not penetrate to the depth of the lumbar tendons.

What I needed was something designed specifically for deep connective tissue. Something that addressed all three stages of the tendon breakdown at once: restoring blood flow, restarting collagen production, and helping repair and organize the collagen already there.

finding halsten rise

That is when I found Halsten Rise.

It is a wearable lumbar wrap with an integrated light therapy panel. You wear it around your lower back for 20 minutes a day.

It does not compress. It does not require you to do anything. You sit on the couch and the light does its work.

What made Rise different from anything else I had looked at was the wavelength system.

It uses three wavelengths simultaneously, each one doing a specific job in sequence.

660nm: Increases blood flow in the tissue of the lower back. Opens the supply lines. Delivers oxygen and nutrients to the tendon tissue that has been starved since estrogen dropped. Prepares the pathway for the deeper wavelengths that follow.

830nm: The wavelength that restarts collagen production. It reaches the tendon cells and reactivates the mitochondria, boosting cellular energy by up to 150 percent. The collagen factory that shut down when estrogen crashed begins to turn back on.

940nm: The deepest-penetrating wavelength. Reaches the lumbar tendons themselves. Calms the inflammation at the source. It helps organize new collagen fibers into strong, properly aligned structures, restoring the structural integrity that the tendons have been losing.

Three wavelengths. One complete cascade.

Prime > Activate > Heal

I read through the website twice. I read the mechanism explanation. I looked up the research on photobiomodulation and lumbar tendons separately, on my own. It held up.

I ordered it on a Thursday afternoon.

What Happened When I Started Using It

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Week 1:

I noticed something I had not felt in years: I was sleeping through the first few hours of the night without waking up to shift positions.

The deep background ache was still there. But something about its quality had changed slightly. It felt a little less insistent.

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Week 2:

The deep background ache was still there. But something about its quality had changed slightly. It felt a little less insistent.

I bent down to pick up something off the kitchen floor and straightened up again without stopping to brace myself. I stood there for a second because I realized what I had just done without thinking.

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Week 3:

I sat through a two-hour film at the cinema with my daughter. I shifted position twice. In three years I had never made it through a film without shifting every 15 to 20 minutes.

The deep ache during prolonged sitting was still present but had become background noise rather than the loudest thing in the room.

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Week 4:

I drove to my sister's house. It is two hours each way. I had not made that drive without stopping to get out and walk around in two years. I made it both ways without stopping.

I did not tell her why I was suddenly able to make the trip. I was not ready to explain it yet in case something changed.

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Week 6:

I spent a Saturday morning working in the garden. Three hours. Bending, kneeling, and standing. I went back inside, made lunch, and then cleaned up, and then sat and read for an hour.

No flare-up that afternoon. No flare-up the next morning.

I called my sister and told her what I had been doing.

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Week 8:

My morning stiffness was down to five minutes or less on most days. Some days I got out of bed and noticed there was almost nothing to loosen up.

I booked the trip with my sister. The one I had cancelled two years ago. I booked it without hesitation.

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Week 12:

I went to my niece's birthday dinner. It was at a restaurant I had quietly avoided for two years because the chairs were uncomfortable and I always left in pain.

I sat there for three hours. I danced at the end of the night.

I drove home, went to bed, and slept without waking up.

I lay there in the dark for a few minutes before I fell asleep, just taking stock of what the evening had been.

I had not planned around the pain once.

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Five Months Later

I am 57 now. It has been five months since I started using Rise.

I still use it every day. Twenty minutes in the morning while I have coffee.

My lower back pain has not disappeared entirely. But it has reduced to a level that I would describe as manageable on most days and absent on many.

The deep, heavy, relentless pressure that defined my life for three years is gone.

I stopped taking naproxen in week five and have not gone back to it.

I have not had a cortisone injection since I started.

I went on that trip with my sister. I signed up for a ceramics class that meets on Tuesday evenings, which involves sitting on a stool for two hours.

I have started saying yes to things I had quietly given up saying yes to.

"I spent three years being told I had a condition I did not have, being given treatments that were never going to work. The thing that actually helped took twenty minutes a day and cost less than two rounds of cortisone injections."

I am not a doctor. I cannot tell you this will work exactly the way it worked for me.

What I can tell you is this:

If you had a hysterectomy, and your lower back has never been the same since.

If you have been told it is sciatica. If nothing you have been given has fixed it.

The explanation you have been looking for exists. You were not wrong about the connection.

The medical system just did not have the framework to see it.

You do not have to keep managing this.

ASS SEEN ON

what other women are saying

— Patricia H., Age 62, North Carolina. Post-hysterectomy

Halsten Helped Me Do What Surgery Couldn’t

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2025

Verified Purchase

“Six years post-hysterectomy and four of those years I was treated for sciatica that was never sciatica. I am eight weeks into using Rise. I walked two miles with my daughter on Saturday and did not need to take anything afterward. I genuinely cannot remember the last time that was possible.”

— Deborah R., Age 59, Georgia. Post-hysterectomy

I Finally Have My Body Back

Reviewed in the United States on August 03, 2025

Verified Purchase

“The morning stiffness alone was worth it. I had been shuffling for 40 minutes every morning just to feel functional. By week three, that was down to ten minutes. By week six it was almost nothing. I wake up and I just get up now.”

— Margaret L., Age 61, Ohio. Post-hysterectomy

From Hopeless Diagnosis to Pure Joy

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2025

Verified Purchase

“I stopped going to my book club because the chairs in the venue triggered a flare that would last two days. I went last month for the first time in a year. Sat there for two hours. Drove home. Made dinner. That was it. Nothing. I actually teared up in the car on the way home.”

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Wearable lumbar light therapy designed specifically for post-hysterectomy women with chronic lower back pain.

20 minutes a day. Direct-to-tendon delivery. Three wavelengths working in cascade.

Triple-Wavelength System: 660nm, 830nm, and 940nm working in sequence

Wearable wrap, adjustable fit, designed for women's bodies

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Simple daily protocol, no complicated setup or schedule

Full usage guide included

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The 90-Day Promise

Use Rise every day for 90 days. If you do not see meaningful improvement in your lower back pain, your morning mobility, and your ability to move through your day without planning around pain, contact us and we will refund every penny. No forms. No conditions. No questions.

You have already spent years trying things that asked nothing back. This one is fully guaranteed.