2/ PLANTAR FASCIITIS. WHY AND HOW I BEAT IT.
If you ever have experienced 'plantar fasciitis', it is as painful as painful can go. When it is acute you can barely walk. I have spent months hobbling around. Most orthopedics offer two treatments. One are a few painful shots of
3/ steroid on the heel. The other is surgical. They will take a X-Ray and show you an inflamed spur on the heel and blame it. All of us have spurs and the spur is mostly not responsible for the pain.
The cure for my 'plantar fasciitis' was pretty straight forward. After many
4/ visits to trigger happy orthopedics in Delhi, i was referred to Dr.BK Singh, at Artemis in Gurgaon, a retired Brigadier, whose brother VADM AK Singh (r) is a good friend. BK Singh prescribed a brace that pumped in air into a pocket each time you put weight on the foot to
5/ shore up the ankle muscles. It is a clever little gizmo and relatively inexpensive. It worked. I wore it for z bit anf the pain was gone in a week. The foot exercises the good doctor showed me ensured it never got 'plantar fasciitis' again.
Now a group of Harvard
6/ evolutionary and bio-mechanics scientists and students, led by evolutionary biologist Dr.Daniel Lieberman, have found that the main reason for 'plantar fasciitis' are the way our shoes are designed.
"The toes of most shoes, especially sneakers, bend ever so slightly
7/ upward. While that curve, called a toe spring, can make walking easier and more comfortable, it may also weaken feet and potentially open them up to some common (and painful) foot-related problems.
The scientists found that the more curved a toe spring is, the less power the
8/ foot inside the shoe has to exert when pushing off from the ground while walking. That means foot muscles are doing less work, and this, the researchers hypothesize, may have consequences.
The researchers say this potential weakness could make people more susceptible to
9/ medical conditions like plantar fasciitis — a common, hard to repair, and painful inflammation of the thick, web-like band of tissue that connects the heel bone to the toes.
“One of the biggest problems in the world today of people’s feet is plantar fasciitis,” Dr.Daniel
10/ Lieberman said: “We think that what happens is that people are relying on their plantar fascia to do what muscles normally do. When you get weak muscles and the plantar fascia has to do more work, it’s not really evolved for that and so it gets inflamed.”"
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