Plantar fasciitis

Many overweight elderly may have experienced tenderness in their feet. In morning this symptom usually aggregate and cause they to walk with a limb to their restroom for a moment until the pain subside.

In extreme case, plantar pain can exist for days. For example, recently after Red Cross Society fair, an old lady has had a long distance walking in the fair. Even thought she started to hurt her feet but she still went on shopping.

Next day she woke up and expected that plantar pain would have gone as usual. Too bad, the pain persist or even worse. After one day of suffering, she decided to came in and ask for further treatment.

This problem usually overlooked by many physicians because the symptom mostly exert particularly in the morning. When our patients are able to meet a doctor late in the morning, the symptom usually already disappeared and nothing will be found by physical examination.

Pathology of plantar fasciitis is explained by stretching of plantar fascia. This fascia act like a sling that connect heel bone together with forefoot bone and form a dome shape of foot. When we stand, each foot will bear half of our body weight.

With dome shape of our feet, the force will be diverted into two directions. In the same time, the dome of our feet will tend to flatten down and spread out. At that moment our plantar fascia, at the base of foot dome, will pull heel and forefoot bone back to maintain dome shape of our feet. In retrospective view, every time we stand, walk, run or jump will stretch out and cause minor trauma to our plantar fascia.

There are several strategies to treat plantar fasciitis. First is to reduce some weight at any means e.g. diet control, exercise. But there still be one factor to concern about choosing exercise. Because most of plantar fasciitis patients are obese, inappropriate exercise such as jogging or aerobic dance may worsening the symptom.

We consider exercise in swimming pool as the most suitable type of exercise for obese patients. Because while you are standing in a swimming pool at the water level of chest. Buoyancy of water will reduce your body weight, the weight that your leg have to bear, down to 30%. Such exercises are swimming and hydroaerobic.