Plantar Fasciitis
Your plantar fascia is a fairly thin, but wide band of tissue that begins at the bottom of your heel and inserts underneath the toes. The plantar fascia helps support the medial longitudinal arch of your foot. What often happens, due to many different reasons, is that the plantar fascia lengthens and starts to produce pain in the base of the foot. The most frequent areas of pain are found around the heel, although the person may feel pain in the middle or even front of the arch near the toes.
2 things generally occur to cause this pain, you will either develop a heel spur or you will have micro tears in the fascia. Usually, I will see someone and they will complain of pain in the morning during the first few steps out of bed or after rest. If this is the case, then it is likely you have developed tearing in the fascia and not a heel spur. Others complain of pain in the heel while walking in the middle of the day, this may be linked to a heel spur, but an X-ray would have to be taken to verify.
The reason you have pain in the morning is because during the night your plantar fascia starts to heal in a relaxed arch position, during the healing process you will develop scar tissue and when you get up to take you first few steps in the morning your arch drops and you end up re-tearing the fascia. After your first few steps the pain seems to get better because the damage has been done early and now your blood is flowing and you are getting warmed up.
A heel spur is your bodies defense against a tissue that is pulling away from bone. If the plantar fascia is very short or tight due to lengthening it will pull the hardest at the weakest link, which is generally at the insertion point, your heel. Your body then starts to calcify a bony outgrowth at that point to prevent the fascia from tearing. Although a good attempt by the body to prevent injury, the person with a heel spur begins to feel pain because they are walking on a bony hard prominence under their heel, ouch!
There are many things you can do to treat Plantar Fasciitis, please check back for my next blog when I will give the many different treatment options in full detail.
Thanks for listening, see you soon
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