Plantar Fasciitis

If you've been diagnosed with plantar fasciitis by your family physician, podiatrist or other health professional, but treatment has not gotten rid of the pain... and you desperately want to avoid surgery... this could be the most important thing you’ll read. Here's what it's all about.  
 

There can be various causes of heel pain. It’s important to get an accurate diagnosis of the cause, so you can get the best treatments available. For generations people who suffered with chronic heel pain were diagnosed by doctors as having heel spurs. It was wrong, most of the time. Medical research proved that bone spurs are rarely the culprit! 

It turns out that heel pain is more frequently the result of tension and swelling of the soft tissues that surround and connect to the heel (even if there's a visible bony spur seen on x-ray). 

This is called Plantar Fasciitis.  

The term, plantar means the bottom of the foot. Fasciitis refers to inflammation of the fascia (the various connective tissues). This soft tissue cause of heel pain was a huge revelation in diagnosis. Sadly, it doesn't seem like this was a sufficient discovery because conventional  treatment appears to still be less than satisfactory. Having foot and heel pain is nothing to sneeze at; it can be debilitating to the point that you can’t even perform the most basic activities of daily life, which you’d normally take for granted. 

But there's hope: 

An effective mixture of techniques are used at the Liebell Clinic. The first is called cold laser therapy. This highly sophisticated, non-surgical technology could be part of the solution, even if your problem has been around for many years. This is not the surgical kind of laser. Years ago, American manufacturer, Erchonia Medical gained FDA approval for the non-surgical treatment of the chronic pain using low-level light therapy, known as the cold laser. It has been working wonders with heel and foot pain, commonly diagnosed as plantar fasciitis. 

Lasers have been widely used by team doctors for elite professional sports teams for years. 

It is one of the components of Liebell Clinic treatment for people with foot/ankle/calf problems, including plantar fasciitis. 

In addition to cold laser therapy, manual joint mobilization techniques, home instruction for "secret" neuromuscular therapy (to relax, not stretch the calf muscles), acupuncture, and kinesio-taping are frequently used, with great success.

A foot problem may even be caused by a nerve problem coming from your back (an area often ignored). There are several conditions which cause foot pain and stiffness. Any of these can result in abnormal walking patterns, which in turn contribute to knee, hip and back problems. 

If you’ve been limping around to keep off the bad foot, favoring one side of your body often causes other areas to hurt without you even realizing it. It’s called compensation. 

This means you are shifting your body weight to take the pressure off your aching foot by leaning more of your weight on the other. This can slowly create muscle imbalances throughout your body—your back in particular. Plus, compensation can work the other way around; your doctor must consider that a back, hip or knee problem could actually be the reason your foot went bad in the first place! 

This is why it’s so important to get treatment that can get rid of pain by getting to the causes of the problem. Treatment designed to improve your body’s skeletal structural balance, as well as foot mobility, that doesn’t make you hurt worse. The odds are great that you can begin your road to recovery today.