Orthotics (insoles) and the role they play in heel and foot pain
Speaker 1
Hi. So, today, we’re going to be talking about insoles and how we use them with foot pain, particularly heel pain. So, usually we wouldn’t give our insoles all of the time, which can be contrary to popular belief.
They’re more of a tool that we use sometimes as part of rehabilitating and getting to the cause of the problem so that your heel pain is healed long-term rather than just propping it up. Some people do say to us that they had insoles put in previously and the pain went away. So, is it therefore not healed?
Speaker 2
And that’s a big issue with them. So, you can put them in and they move your foot into a different position and that moves a whole series of structures and suddenly gets you out of pain. What it’s doing is a bit like a crutch. It’s just propping you up, and it’s getting you out of pain for that short period of time. Eventually, you will start to develop issues elsewhere because it’s a very quick intervention. It happens by that, whereas your problem is that your skeleton and your muscle tissue develops over a long period of time. So, we’ve got to look at moving you out of position, getting you through a whole series of other programs to get on top of the actual issue and then we can get rid of the orthotics.
Further down the line.
Speaker 1
And the way to think about if you’ve got heel and foot pain, and obviously a lot of us are mobile a lot of the time, it actually takes a very long time for a problem to develop, unless you’ve had a particular trauma, but if it’s come on slowly over time, it’s taken a long time to get to that point. It takes time for it to heal. So, if you’ve had a response where your pain goes away instantly, it’s probably that the pain is gone, but it’s not healed. So, I would say that is a general rule.
Speaker 2
That’s the rule. Yeah, generally. To summarize, basically, they’re great as a crutch and that’s how we use them. They prop you up for a period of time, but then we want you to be out of them before you become dependent on them, so that you don’t have that heel pain coming back year on year, which is what can happen.