How to Fix Foot Pain
As a Podiatrist, my passion is to help you achieve your goals without your feet limiting you.
All too often health professionals focus on your pain and base treatment around just getting you out of pain.
But this doesn't fix the cause of the pain in the first place.
Then unfortunately a few months later the pain returns; does this sound familiar?
Thankfully there is a better way... In this blog, I will explain to you how you can get out of pain and stay out of pain to help you achieve your goals.
What is your WHY?
Your why your reason and the goal that you want to achieve which your pain is stopping you from achieving.
Your why is the reason why you came to see a Podiatrist about your foot pain.
It may be you want to dance at your daughter's wedding or are afraid you won't be able to play with your grandchildren or to be more mobile to continue to live independently.
Whatever it may be your WHY is your driving force to help you not only get out of pain but live healthier and stronger than you ever have.
Knowing your "why" will significantly improve your chance of having a great outcome and being able to get back to what you love doing.
The COMPLETE Approach
At Complete Podiatry, we focus on your why and we give you a management plan with four steps to help you achieve this.
Step 1: Manage Pain and Improve Function
When a client comes to see us they are usually in some degree of pain and poor function.
To put it simply (it is a huge topic); pain is your body's response to what your brain judges to be a threatening situation.
This pain may be stopping you from walking or moving properly and affects your daily and work life.
So the first thing we have to do is put in strategies to reduce your pain, this includes:
- Ice
- Anti-inflammatory medication/creams
- Compression
- Shockwave therapy
Step 2: Offload the Injured Tissue
Once we have reduced your pain we need to offload the area which is painful.
Offloading will allow your injured tissue to heal and repair while you are able to remain active.
We can offload injured tissues of the foot and ankle by:
- Changing your daily activity and load
- Changing your shoes
- Taping
- Orthotics
- Ankle bracing
Step 3: Improve the Health of your Injured Tissue
After you have injured tendons or muscles in your foot and ankle they need time to heal.
However, the good news is that we can use different technology and techniques to speed up this healing process.
Shockwave therapy and dry needling can both be used to help improve the blood flow to certain damaged areas of your body.
This improved blood flow brings newly oxygenated blood to the injured tissue which then helps to speed up the healing process.
Step 4: Make the Injured Tissue Stronger
This is often the step that most people miss, but it is the most crucial step to prevent re-injury.
To touch on what I spoke about earlier often health professionals focus on getting you out of pain.
If we have this approach we have not fixed the cause of the pain in the first place.
For example, you might have a weak calf muscle and if you don't strengthen your calf to be stronger than it was before then 9/10 you will re-injure yourself again.
A progressive, targeted and appropriate home-based exercise program focused on the injured muscles and tendons is the key final step to any successful management plan.
Once you have COMPLETED these four steps you will achieve your WHY!
How we can Help
At Complete Podiatry, we focus on your Why and individualise a management plan with achievable steps to get you back to doing the things that you love to do
We don't see you as your heel pain; we see you as a Grandfather who can't play with his grandchildren.
If you are experiencing pain, the first thing to do is book an appointment with one of the Podiatrists at Complete Podiatry for a comprehensive assessment to identify your WHY.
Once this is done, we will develop a structured management plan that outlines our best advice for how to help you achieve your WHY.
Just call us on 8330 0004 or book online.
I'll love to talk to you about how we can help you build an amazing life from the feet up!
Alex Taylor
Podiatrist at Complete Podiatry