We don’t often pay much attention to our feet unless they are hurting, and each day they perform countless tasks we take for granted. They provide us with a stable base to walk, run and jump, but they are also interconnected to many other areas of the body, like your knees, hip and back. Because of how your feet interconnect with other areas of your body, if you ignore your foot health, you may find that other parts of your body will soon be hurting. And on the flip side, a pain somewhere else may be rectified by treating an issue in your foot.
In today’s blog, we take a closer look at how your foot health is connected to the health of other body parts, and we explain how you can target your feet to improve your whole body health.
Your Feet Are A Gateway
Your foot health is tied closely with the health of a number of related body parts, because if something goes wrong with your feet, it can greatly shift how pressure is naturally dispersed in your body. For example, if you sprain your ankle, you might try to walk it off and let time eventually take care of your injury. While your body is working to heal, it will also be trying to shield the area from additional stress and pain. Oftentimes you’ll find yourself hobbling or limping in order to protect this area.
In order to remove stress from one area, you need to shift it to another. This means your uninjured foot now needs to bear more stress. But it’s not just your foot that has to deal with these stress changes. It’s also your ankle, your knee, your hips and your spine. As structures work to handle the new stress, it’s not uncommon for injuries to arise. Untreated foot or ankle injuries can eventually lead to pulled muscles, torn ligaments, balance issues and even the need for joint replacement surgery.
With that said, if we know how key our foot health is to a number of other structures in our body, then we can treat issues aggressively such that the original injury heals and you’re no longer at risk for related injuries. But how can you best treat a foot injury?
We hate to group all foot injuries together, because there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but oftentimes active treatment techniques are best. Whether through surgery or physical therapy exercises, these active techniques have the same underlying goal, which is to help you become stronger than you were prior to your injury. Rest and pain medications can work to dull symptoms, but if you’re not working to build the muscles and joint strength in your feet and ankles, odds are another injury isn’t far behind. You need to build up your foot strength by targeting the connective tissues that handle mechanical stress when you move. By improving your lateral ankle ligament strength, you just might find that your knee or hip pain absolves as stress if more evenly distributed across your body.
So if you are dealing with a foot injury, or you’ve been told that your knee, hip or back pain is being caused by a gait or foot issue, make sure you reach out to a specialist like Dr. Silverman. Oftentimes care needs to start from the ground up, and that means focusing on your feet! For more information, or for help with your foot issue, reach out to Dr. Silverman’s office today.