Heel Pain

Heel pain, or plantar fasciitis, is one of the most common conditions that we see in the office. Many patients often relate their heel pain to "heel spur syndrome." Although there could be a heel spur present on the bottom of the calcaneal bone, the pain is most often due to inflammation of the plantar fascia band, which is a fibrous tissue that stretches across the bottom of the foot from the heel bone to the metatarsals at the front of the foot.

Causes:

-Injury to the plantar fascia

-Flat feet

-High arched feet

Symptoms:

-Pain near the heel

-Pain after resting or waking

-Pain may subside with initial activity and return after the more time on feet

Treatments:

Treatments vary from care at home to surgical intervention in the most severe cases. Cases requiring surgery are very few, and we follow a specific treatment regimen that has yielded terrific results. If you are in the initial stages of heel pain, we recommend some easy treatments that you can do from the comfort of your home.

These include:

-Icing by rolling a frozen water bottle underneath your foot

-Stretching your calf muscles multiple times a day

-Towel stretch sitting down pulling the top part of your foot back towards you

If these heel pain treatments are not effective, or you have been suffering with heel pain for a period of time, we recommend seeing your podiatrists. Initial treatments consist of an oral anti-inflammatory, a boot that passively stretches your foot while at rest and continued home physical therapy. Cortisone injections could be required if pain does not resolve. Our first priority is to relief you of your acute heel pain. Once that is achieved, we suggest a shoe orthotic to prevent recurrence of heel pain. Shoe orthotics help correct the underlying mechanical problem that caused your heel to hurt in the first place. If all of these treatments fail to fully alleviate your heel pain, we could consider a minimally invasive procedure. Fortunately, these cases are few and far between. In most cases, patients are pleasantly surprised that their heel pain significantly decreases with just a couple visits to the podiatrists.