Heel Spur Plantar Fasciitis is covered in this video.

Hi gang,  I’m Dr. Jay Breitlow with New Leaf Chiropractic and Family Wellness. And what I’ll talk to you about a little bit today is what is commonly referred to as plantar fasciitis. So this is an x-ray of somebody who shall remain nameless, it might be me, who has a heel spur. So you see this little, kind of, lip right there? So that’s not normal. When you look at a normal heel, what you should see is something that looks just like that.

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And so that’s happened here. And what this feels like, by the way, this feels like you’re actually stepping on a razor.  If you wake up first thing in the morning, and it feels like when you put your foot down, like a razor is going up through the bottom of your foot, chances are you’ve got either plantar fasciitis, or your plantar fasciitis has graduated to a heel spur.

So what’s actually happening here, is this whole area is just filled with soft tissue. That’s your plantar fascia soft tissue. Plantar means the bottom part of your foot. So the bottom part of your foot, the soft tissue. Fasciitis means irritated. What’s happening is the soft tissue is supposed to move a little bit like this. You can see how easily those move past one another. But start wearing high-heeled shoes, you start putting your foot in like biking shoes and you start having your toes curl, all of a sudden all of this fascia gets shortened up. What happens is, it starts to grate against one another.

Instead of moving smoothly, it’s grated like this.  Eventually, it becomes one matted ball in there. And guess what? It starts to get its own nerve supply. It starts to get its own blood supply. And then.. this starts to take on a mind of it’s own.

Now, how can you treat this on your own? What can we do? So quite simply, here’s what you want to do .. and I’m going to sit down here. We got a couple different things that you can do for treatments at home. And you just want to look at my foot here, Carissa. Golf ball, tennis ball, anything round.

What you want to do, is you want to get in, and you just want to mobilize that. This probably doesn’t feel all that great if you’ve got a true heel spur plantar fasciitis. By the way, this was the foot that once had plantar fasciitis and a heel spur. And it has now resolved, in part due to this .. and some of the stuff that we do in the office also.

So, start off with something like a racquetball. This is a lacrosse ball, so it’s really hard. I can’t squeeze it. On Amazon, for like 10 bucks they have these smaller. And I like the smaller ones, like golf ball size, because it actually gets in there. It can really roll that plantar fascia out.

The ones on Amazon have little feet on them, almost. I usually keep that at home, and just kind of roll my foot out. Just to keep it functioning, keep it loose, and keep it mobile. So that’s 1 thing you can do.

What do I do with the water bottle? Take this guy and toss it in the freezer. This would be a great place to start if that hurts. It’s all frozen, this is not frozen. But you’re going to take a frozen water bottle, can be nice and cool, and you can numb some of the pain just by doing this. You will only get a little bit of motion with this, but in the beginning stages, for sure, any little motion is gonna be a help.

So you would go from the frozen water bottle to like racquetball, tennis ball, maybe lacrosse ball; move your way to some of the stuff that Amazon has. But I’m a big fan of getting that lateral movement, not just the forward and back. And you can make some figure eights there. If you’re bored, you can: A, B, C.

So you can try to make the alphabet with it, to really get all of the areas in the bottom part of the foot. Some other things you can do, we’re just gonna use this ledge here. But you can just go outside. And you wanna try to stretch your calf. So just grab a curb or something, and you just wanna hold this.

Five, 10, 15, 20 seconds, as long as you can. ‘Cause part of what’s going on with the anatomy here, and we’ll go back to the X-ray. Part of what’s going on with the anatomy is that this plantar fascia is connected through your heel, a.k.a. your calcaneus, and that goes up into your calf muscle 

So you want to get that calf muscle nice and loose. The looser that is, the more it’s going to take pressure off the bottom. So anything of the plantar or the posterior aspect, any way u can get that loosened up is gonna be good. Massage is a great choice for getting in to mobilize that.

To see more info on ‘Massage Foot‘, visit Massage Foot YT video.

We also have some specific techniques that we can do in the office that are really, really painless. If you’re doing this and it hurts, I go, “Oh geez, I don’t want you working on that also.” Just know that we’ve got some very, very painless techniques that are really, really effective for dealing with heel spurs.

We’ve almost 100%, I don’t want to say I’ve got 100% success rate. We have a highly successful rate when treating either heel spurs, or plantar fascia, with one of our instruments in the office. (we use our hands too). So that’s all I’ve got on plantar fasciitis and heel spurs. We basically treat them the exact same way — because what you’re looking at, in the end, is you’re looking at elongating that tissue.

Let’s go back to our tissue model. The more and more you can get those guys to elongate and stretch out, the more likely it is that that tissue will start to move past one another again :nice and easy” .. instead of the bundled up version like that.

Thanks gang..

Definitions: Calcaneus = the large bone forming the heel.

Plantar fasciitis = the thick tissue on the bottom of the foot. It connects the heel bone to the toes and creates the arch of the foot. When this tissue becomes swollen or inflamed, it is called plantar fasciitis.

Reference:  FOOT MASSAGE PRESSURE POINTS

 

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