Foot Health Week is an annual campaign run by Foot Health Australia to raise awareness about how important your feet are to your overall wellbeing. This year the theme is “Love your feet and… they’ll love you back!” When your feet are heathy, they can support your body which increases your sense of wellbeing.
“The toe bone connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the heel bone, the heel bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the shin bone….” You may remember this song growing up. It’s called “Dem Bones” and it reminds us that we are a sum of all parts, not just one or the other.
Here is a brief overview of your feet. The human foot has 26 bones, 33 joints and over 100 tendons, muscles and ligaments. With so many working parts, this intricate and highly developed structure needs a little regular care to carry you through your life comfortably.
Getting regular podiatry check-ups is one of the wisest investments in your preventive healthcare that you can make. There are many benefits:
- Regular podiatry relieves pain – unexplained foot pain that persists should be checked out by a podiatrist.
- Treats infections – such as fungal infections, skin lesions and nail problems.
- Helps you to identify possible health conditions – your feet can show you underlying health conditions that can be treated before they become a bigger problem.
- Supports good long term foot health – by discussing correct footwear and assessing your gait, you’ll receive ongoing professional advice on how to keep your feet healthy. If you’re engaged in sports other activities, if you’re pregnant or getting older and need some extra tips to keep your feet pain-free and functioning well, then regular podiatry will help you.
Read more here: Caring about your feet – the benefits of regular podiatry
Here are some relevant articles that you can read to help you look after your feet better at home.
On your feet all day? For office workers and tradies
As a tradie, you spend plenty of time on your feet, squatting, stretching, reaching and using the muscles of your body constantly. If there’s any misalignment in your spine, hips and feet, you’re probably going to feel it more.
Your feet would take you more than 10,000 steps per day, which is about eight kilometres every day. Good hip and spine health start from the feet up. Tradies most commonly get sore feet because:
- Standing in the same place for a long time
- Repetitive activity
- Standing on hard surfaces for a long time
- Wearing work boots that don’t fit correctly
For tips to look after your health, along with advice on buying the correct work boots, click here:
Foot pain in the office? How to minimise long term foot problems.
Foot pain is not only a result of high impact activities such as jogging and hiking. It also occurs at the office where we sit for longer. Add ill-fitting shoes or high heels to the scenario, and you might be experiencing arch pain, heel pain or corns and callouses.
Read more on tips to help sore feet if you’re sitting more than walking everyday.
Teenagers and young kids – tips for healthy feet growing up
We help many teenagers who visit our clinic for a variety of foot problems, most commonly ingrown toenails, warts and flat feet. A teenager’s physiology changes rapidly during these years. Soft ligaments and bones are growing to support a larger body mass, so “growing pains” are common and not a cause for concern in most cases. Read on for our advice on helping your teens look after their feet at home.
Severs Disease: Causes, Symptoms and Treatment
Speaking about growing pains, if your kids love their sports, repetitive activity can affect one or both of their heels and cause quite a bit of pain. Children between the ages of 7-14 years who are active and play regular sports but experience heel pain afterward, may have Severs Disease. Severs disease is not actually a disease, it’s a condition related to growing pain in feet. Read on for our tips to manage growing pains.
7 tips to choose well-fitting shoes for your children
Children and even teens cannot always tell us what’s wrong. They may feel pain or discomfort in the feet and their shoes may be the simple cause. Here are our tips to choose correct fitting footwear for growing feet.
The 10 most common foot problems we deal with in our podiatry clinic
If you’re wondering what that niggling feeling is in your foot, here’s a summary of the ten common reasons for foot problems and foot pain we see week to week.
Maintaining foot health with diabetes
It’s important to look after your feet on a daily basis if you have diabetes. Diabetes increases the chances of developing problems in your feet and often diabetes symptoms can show up in your feet first. Common problems are peripheral neuropathy which is essentially nerve damage, or peripheral vascular disease which is poor circulation.
Both conditions can delay the natural healing process, and an inability to feel pressure or pain creating numbness in the feet and toes. This can lead to infections, ulcerations and potentially worse peoblems if not treated in time.
Read on for our tips and advice on looking after your feet at home.
The benefits of walking
Get walking – and experience the many proven health benefits!
The wonderful thing about walking is that it’s free and can be done at any time of the day. Once you understand the benefits that this simple form of exercise has to your health and wellbeing, you’ll want to be walking all the time! Just 15 minutes a day is all it takes to experience these benefits.
Read on to find out more about how walking benefits your feet and overall health.
What does your walking style do for your foot health?
Your gait is the way you move when you walk or run. When we conduct a Gait Analysis, we use a scientifically developed method to analyse your walking or running style by observing the way you move and the impact of this movement on your feet, hips, lower back and limbs. This analysis provides us with a significant amount of information which in turn helps us understand the best course of treatment for foot, ankle, knee and hip pain.
The process of observing your gait helps us to determine overactive and underactive muscles to identify biomechanical problems which can lead to injuries or other problems.
Find out more about how a gait analysis can help to identify underlying foot problems.
What is GAIT analysis and how does it help?
Feeling pain in your feet? When you need to see a podiatrist
Here are some common symptoms that indicate you may need a podiatrist:
- Painful feet – arches, heel or forefoot pain
- Pain in your legs, knees, hips or lower back
- Numbness or altered sensation
- Corns and calluses are developing
- Toenails are becoming thickened or mis-shaped
- If you are finding walking or standing uncomfortable
- Leg or foot pain during sport
Call Sanders Podiatry in Adelaide, Stirling or Mount Barker
Your feet are mirrors of your overall health. Keep your feet in good walking order and you’ll remain in good working order – there are plenty more miles to walk in your life so make sure you’re as comfortable as can be. Sanders Podiatry Clinic are a family owned podiatry service with three locations in Adelaide. Call us and book an appointment with a specialist podiatrist.
Contact us at the following locations:
Sander Podiatry Adelaide – 08 8379 1456 (Greenhill Podiatry)