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October 5, 2013
Feet
Hi ,
Feet are funny looking things - kind of like our legs started to fray at the ends. They don't have the elegance or dexterity our hands have, yet in their own right they are quite amazing. Even more amazing is how much they can hurt when they are not working right.
Each foot has more bones in it than our entire spine - 26 bones. The design of the foot is like an arched bridge with 32 muscles and ligaments all holding it together.
Foot Structure Chart
With so many bones and muscles you can begin to appreciate how complex feet really are. The more complex something is the more likely things can go wrong.
Why is the foot so complex? In a single word - balance. Look at the feet of a horse, no foot complexity at all. Their feet are solid - but they have four of them. Like your dining room chair, four feet on the ground is pretty solid. Tilt back on just two feet in that same chair and all of a sudden things are not so balanced. Now try and move around the dining room balanced on just two of the feet of the chair and you easily see you need some serious help with balance.
Balancing something tall on just two feet is already difficult, but getting it to balance while moving and changing directions is next to impossible. Feet were designed much like hands in that they are designed to grasp the ground, tilt, and twist to help you stay upright. That is why there are so many muscles. Your feet are designed to instantly adapt to what they land on and try to create a stable footing for you.
The arch shape to the foot is part of a shock absorbing mechanism to protect the many small bones in the foot. The arch acts like leaf springs in a car by absorbing your weight and forcing your leg and foot to the ground. When the foot muscles are strong they protect the ligaments in the foot from becoming over stretched or torn. If the muscles are not strong, little micro-tears form in the ligaments that gradually cause inflammation and pain.
Years ago I experienced a bout of plantar fasciitis. It lasted about eight months. Nothing I did helped it at all - laser, ice, heat, or immobilization. Wearing shoe orthotics felt better while I was wearing them, but the instant I wasn't wearing them the heel hurt like crazy. I started the slow process of rehabilitating the foot muscles and slowly the problem resolved. None of the quick fix cures I researched and tried helped. I had to do the work of actually rebuilding normal function in the foot.
So what happens that starts and causes this kind of problem? Think about what happens to the hand and arm muscles of someone who breaks their wrist and has to have the hand and forearm put into a cast. Within a few weeks the muscles of the hand and arm get weaker and smaller.  Look at the arm of someone who has just had a cast taken off compared to their other arm. You'll see a huge difference - almost like the arms belong to two different people. It only takes two weeks being stuck in bed to lose half of your muscle tone and strength.
How does this happen with our feet? It happens because we strap casts on our feet every day called shoes. Shoes protect us from the natural environment at the price of eliminating the natural muscle strengthening that takes place when the foot muscles work to grab the uneven texture of the ground to keep us balanced and moving forward. In shoes your foot muscles have almost nothing to do so they get weak.
Is this happening to you? Check your feet. Do you have high arches without much meat on the underside of the foot? Even worse, does your arch tend to flatten out when you stand up? Have someone look at your heels from behind when you stand. Does the heel bend out to the side? These are all signs of foot pronation due to loss of strength in your arch muscles.
Healthy feet have a good arch that is supported by a lot of muscle on the bottom of the foot. A healthy foot may look like a flat foot because of all the muscle under the arch, except that the arch is maintained and the foot does not pronate (which is the twisting and flattening of the foot as the arch collapses.)
The foot pains we experience in our modern world - bunions, heel spurs, plantar fasciitis, fallen arches, metatarsalgia, and so on - are all caused from wearing shoes. Like so many areas of life, our quest for safety and convenience causes our pain.
A special note on bunions; the human foot is designed to be narrow at the heel and get gradually wider as you come to the toes...like a duck's foot. Our toes are like pudgy claws designed to spread out and grab the soil to give us balance and traction. Somewhere along the line someone got the idea that the foot would look better if the toes were pointed together rather than splayed out. That meant bending the toe joints inward against their natural design. That deforms the joints causing joint damage and arthritis. Add on top of that another "great" idea which is to walk on your toes to get taller and appear shapelier. Now joints that were designed to only grip and pull forward are now working as weight bearing joints. Imagine trying to walk on your fingers. How long do you think your fingers would last? As beautiful as high heels are and as much as they make you more attractive, they are foot killers. If you must wear them, do so only where 95% of the time you will be sitting down and not walking in them. They are foot jewelry, not functional footwear.
What is the ideal way to prevent foot problems? Spending your time walking barefoot on natural terrain is the best way. Shoes are the primary way we have caused foot problems. The second way we have also caused foot problems as well as balance problems as we age is because we have taken away the natural texture and balance challenges constantly offered by natural terrain and replaced it with hard flat surfaces - floors, pavement, sidewalks, etc... This is completely unnatural for our feet and denies them the ability to get their daily balance and strength workout they need to stay strong.
We literally need to do muscle workouts with our feet muscles. We need to practice grabbing with our toes and lifting our arches throughout the day. We need to spend time every day barefoot walking on soft pliable surfaces. Walking in sand is ideal. Walking barefoot on grass and natural terrain is great. If you are stuck in the heart of civilization with nothing natural around then you have to improvise with walking on cushions, doing short foot exercises, and toe grabbing exercises. You have to simulate balance challenges with rocker boards, wobble boards, and Bosu balls. Your feet need certain types of exercises or they will degenerate and cause pain.
One of the complaints most health practitioners and I frequently deal with is runner's foot and leg pain. A new trend that is developing to deal with this problem is barefoot running. Fancy running shoes make it easy for runners to adopt an unnatural gait in which their foot strikes the ground heel first producing a lot of heel- strike shock to the system. Barefoot running makes this gait obviously uncomfortable, so barefoot runner's learn to use a mid-foot strike with the ground that eliminates the shock to the skeletal system. One running expert's article I read recently stated that the best way to correct a poor running gait was to practice running barefoot on a golf course.
Barefoot Running Biomechanics
The last area of feet I want to address is the role of the feet in aiding our total health through grounding us to the earth. This is not some airy-fairy stuff, but good old chemistry I am talking about. We run on electricity. When we convert the food we eat into energy, we steal the electrons (electricity) from the food molecules to make electron-rich high-energy fuel for us to run on. What is left over from the food is electron deficient molecules that want to steal electrons back from us. We call these molecules free radicals. They are thought to be the main cause of aging. We want to eat lots of anti-oxidant foods because they donate electrons to these free radicals and neutralize them.
We have another simpler source of freely available electrons for us to use to neutralize free radicals - the earth. The earth is naturally electron rich and carries a net (-) negative charge. We become (+) positively charged because of the food breakdown process. If we just plant our feet directly in the soil some of the negative charge from the earth will move into us to cancel out the buildup of positive charges inside us. This heals us. Wearing shoes insulates us from the earth so we lose the ability for the earth to neutralize toxic free radicals. Our bodies were designed to be in contact with the earth 24/7. Now we are almost never touching the earth directly. Free health tip - connect with the earth. It is part of what our feet were designed to do.
Take care,
David
We will be on vacation the last week of September 9/21 to 9/29.
For emergencies call Dr Fisher at
(916) 488-6565
Ultrasound Physical Therapy
Now available in the office
Tuesdays and Fridays
How to find us -
Our address is 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd.
Finding the new location is very easy. Coming from highway 50 up Sunrise Blvd, you turn left and go up a block. We are on the right hand side - the building just past the Subway Sandwich shop. If you are coming down Sunrise from the Mall area then just turn right on Fair Oaks Blvd and up a block on the right.
If you are coming from the Roseville area you could come down Sunrise Blvd, but that is a long trek. It is probably shorter time wise to come down Auburn Blvd - San Juan Ave like you have been for the Sunset
office, but instead of turning left at Sunset, keep going straight 3
more lights to Fair Oaks Blvd and turn left. Go down 2 lights to New York Ave, go through the intersection, and immediately turn into the turn lane once the center divider ends. We are on the left.
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