RELIEF FROM PLANTAR FASCIITIS – NICHOLAS A. CHENEY, D.O.
Transcript:
Plantar fasciitis is one of my favorite things to take care of. For me, it’s all part of an arch that’s failing. The plantar fascia is a big, thick ligament on the bottom of the foot that attaches the heel to the ball of the foot and it prevents the foot from getting longer. But if the arch is being driven down and collapsing, that gets stretched and it can hurt.
And so, unfortunately, most of the current treatments are based upon treating the inflamed fascia instead of what’s actually creating the problem, which is an imbalance of tension in the calf muscles. So, it becomes very easy to treat if you understand that philosophy.
The calf muscle that that overloads the front of the foot drives that arch down. And so that’s the first thing I do with patients, is have them work on stretching. All the other common modalities of rolling your foot on a Coke bottle, you know, the physical therapy, putting people in a boot; all those things are valid and physical therapy, they can help. But the biggest key is getting that stretch. And unfortunately, if you can’t get enough stretch, sometimes I have to do it for you.
It’s about a two-minute operation where I just stretch that one calf muscle that’s too tight. Patients wake up with a boot on. They can walk immediately afterwards and we’ve got fairly good results in the studies that we’ve done with that.
