

People with pain in the front of their foot, they’ll come in commonly with what they’ve been told is a stress fracture. most of the time it’s not a stress fracture, but it’s on its way.
It has to do with how the weight is distributed on the front of the foot is the arch starts to fail, weight starts to shift the bones that weren’t designed to take that much weight. And as that happens, you can get pain in those joints adjacent to the big toe. It can feel like you’re walking on a marble or bunched-up sock, the joint can become painful.
People feel like they’ve got a fracture. And in the end, it’s all about redistributing the weight on the foot to try to help improve that. That condition is called metatarsalgia.
You can also have a Morton’s neuroma that I believe is caused the same way just by that overload and that nerve between the bones becomes inflamed and irritated from the same uneven distribution of weight.
The only time that I really tell patients where you need surgery is if you’ve got some kind of a fracture that if we don’t fix it or don’t stabilize it or address it, you could end up worse off down the road.
So most of the sports type problems, the chronic nature of problems, I tell patients: “look, we can treat this as long as you want, and if and when you say you can’t take it anymore, then we can consider surgery”. But it’s always a last resort.