Plantar Fasciitis Treatment - an excerpt from Craig Payne posted on the Podiatry Arena

This is an excerpt from a posting by Craig Payne - Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia from the Podiatry-Arena forum.  It is reposted with his permission.  Special thanks to Peter Bird for bringing this forum posting to my attention.  Pictures were added by me, to help illustrate.  The original posting had no photos or illustrations.


Ok, Mr Runner, you have got plantar fasciitis. Plantar fasciitis occurs when the load in the plantar fascia exceeds what the tissue can take, so we have only two things we can do. One is reduce the load and the other is increase the ability of the tissues to take the load. Reducing the load is easy and is something we can do today. Increasing the ability of the tissue to take the load is more difficult, takes time and is not something we can do in the short term.

[caption id="attachment_2329" align="alignright" width="300"] Low Dye Strapping -  photo from http://conejofeet.com/patients-guide-heel-pain/[/caption]

I know you have a marathon to run in 4 weeks. Is the plantar fasciitis interfering with your preparation for that? If it is, then we will use low dye strapping today to get a more acute effect of reducing the load. At least that will help the symptoms and start the healing process while we keep an eye on that marathon preparation.

The Plantar Fasciitis Trials - Part 3 - The Podiatrist

So.. Picking up where I left off on part 2 - Off to see the podiatrist.

First, lets look at my thoughts/views/experiences regarding podiatrists.  I had never been to one (that covers experiences.)

I love research, so I had googled everything I possibly could in regards to  Plantar Fasciitis and (when I first got them) Vibram Five Fingers.  This had led me  to several Podiatry forums.  I read everything I possibly could on both topics - after all, these were the foot experts right?   Before I looked into Plantar Fasciitis and had been researching VFFs, I noticed a really common theme.  Podiatrists hated them.  This wasn't a huge surprise, after all Christopher McDougall had said the same thing in articles and in his book.  It was amazing to me the outright vehemence that the Podiatrists posted about them. The more common viewpoint seemed to be that any form of "minimalist" shoe was simply a horrible injury waiting to happen, whether you did "too much too soon" or not.  In fact, the whole idea of "too much too soon" as a problem was ridiculed.

Visit with the Podiatrist

So I posted a brief bit on Facebook about what the podiatrist had to say, but I have been crazy-busy so I wasn't able to get back here until today.

First, I expected one of two (From what I have read online) standard Podiatrist viewpoints toward the Vibram Five Fingers.

1)  These things are horrible. No one should ever wear them (or walk barefoot) as our feet should be in shoes that make them work properly.  They are just begging for injury because they don't let your foot work like it should.

2) They are ok, and there is nothing wrong with wearing them, but