Plantar Fasciitis & Achilles Pain |

Plantar Fasciitis & Achilles Pain

Plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendinopathy are two of the most over-diagnosed conditions for anyone with foot or ankle pain. If you’re experiencing pain on the underside of your foot or on the back of your ankle, just above your heel, it’s likely that you’ve irritated the fascia or tendon, likely through over-use or improper biomechanics.

Due to the damage of the connective tissue, resting it or buying an over-the-counter brace are not enough to correct the problem. Consequently, it often goes mis-treated and becomes a chronic complaint.

One of the most effective treatments is to remodel the tissue through controlled load and rehab, strengthen the intrinsic muscles of the foot, and manual therapy throughout the kinetic chain and the small joints of the feet.

It is so important to get this pain evaluated by a professional who understands the rehab necessary to correct it. It is not something that you want to attempt to self-diagnose or self-prescribe treatments based on the internet alone. This includes utilizing kinesiotape and orthopedic braces that you are able to purchase over-the-counter. Not to say these tools are never appropriate, but that should be the decision of the medical professional.

Depending on bracing long-term, even for just athletic performance, can have detrimental effects on our biomechanics and can allow our muscles and surrounding tissues to get weak and become dependent on the brace for support, causing more issues.

Common Issues We Treat

Bullet points for the plantar fasciitis page as well:
Foot pain while walking/running
Flat feet/ Pes Planus/ Arch collapse
Metatarsalgia
Heel pain
Arch pain
Achilles tendinitis
Sprain/Strain

WHAT IT IS

Plantar fasciitis and Achilles pain are often mechanical in nature, meaning that it’s a result of how we move and use our body. To fix a mechanical problem, you need a mechanical solution. The rehab that we provide, both in-office and teaching the patient to do themselves, aims to restore full and pain-free ranges of motion and then strengthen the surrounding muscles and tissues to better tolerate load and stress.

If you were to break your arm and not seek treatment or casting, the bone would eventually heal itself. You would lose function and range of motion, but it would eventually stop hurting on its own.

Connective tissue damage is a bit more complicated than that. Left alone to just “rest” or restricted to a splint or soft cast, the tendon and tissue will not be remodeled, will not heal on its own, and the pain will persist for long after the initial injury or incident. This is why seeking appropriate treatment is so important.

WHAT IT ISN’T

Plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendon pain can be frustrating to deal with due to its chronic nature and unresponsiveness to most other treatments. That doesn’t mean that you must live with the pain forever or even that it would take dozens of visits to correct.

No matter how chronic the complaint, there is usually still improvement to be made, if not full resolution, however, the sooner you get a connective tissue problem like these evaluated and treated, the better the prognosis and the faster the recovery.