My plantar fasciitis is getting worse

Hello Aurelie,

I am glad my reply to you got through because when I wrote it I got the message that it needs review and approval by the website administrator as I had included links to other websites.

I am 33 years old and used to be very active. I was on my feet sometimes 12-14h daily. In the past year I had only 2 days completely off when I was just relaxing at home, not doing anything special. I think I pushed myself too hard and this was my body's way to tell me to stop and relax. I found it extremely hard at the beginning, was very frustrated and utterly miserable. I still caried on with my personal training and lifting weights even a month after my left foot started to hurt. I only came to my senses when my right foot started hurting as well.

I live in the UK but I am not English. I am originally from Latvia and Yasmiina is not my real name. I am in Latvia at the moment staying with my mom.

If icing hurts your feet, don't do it! Listen to your body and never ever harm it. There are so many things and people that will do it for you. You have to love and pamper yourself.

My trainers are Asics, my previous trainers were Nike. I don't know which model they are, I just asked for the maximum support when I bought them. I also have Footbalance insoles which I don't use because they started hurting my arches. I used to have very nice high arches which have now collapsed as a result of PF. So, I will have to learn to live with flat feet. There are some yoga exercises for feet, also for fallen arches which I occasionally do. You can type in youtube foot yoga and they will come up. But before you start doing anything, you have to be relatively pain free. As I said never ever do anything that hurts or make the pain worse.

In the worst period of pain I took Ibuprofen for 10 days. It kind of helped but it stained my teeth. So, when I went to the hygenist to remove them she asked me how many cigarettes per day I smoke. The irony in this is that I have never ever smoked in my entire life! :-)

As you can gather I am not a big fan of the conventional medicine with its synthetic drugs and surgical methods. I firmly believe that our body, mind and soul are connected and the physical illness is the indication that something is not right in your mind or soul.

If you are like minded there are some good books I can recommend.

Joseph Murphy "The power of your subconscious mind"

Peter Kummer "Nichts ist unmoglich" (I don't know whether it is translated into English, I read it in Latvian, the original is in German)

All Louise Hay's books. Also Luule Viilma's books. Again I don't know whether there is an English translation. They are in Estonian in original but I read them in Latvian.

About Birkenstock sandals. They are good for healthy feet to prevent any future problems. In our case the soles are just too hard. We both have to wait until we get better to start wearing them.

I will let you in the secret that no doctor or specialist will tell you - if you need to walk around the house wear high heels. The higher the better. It is counter intuitive and sounds outright illogical and stupid but it helps! The reason is very simple, you get your heel of the ground and 90% of your weight is on the balls of your feet. BUT stretch your calves very frequently because wearing high heels shortens the calf muscles which in turn pull on your fascia thus making the whole thing even worse.

One of my friends who has had PF in her left foot wore her trainers for 6 months. Now she has been pain free for 1.5 years and can wear whetever she wants. It is encouraging and gives me hope. Although I am aware that every case can be different and we all have different degrees of damage sustained to our feet.

The doctors are divided when it comes to walking barefoot. Some say that it should be shunned, the others encourage it. The truth as always lays in the middle. Once you are relatively pain free you can start with walking 100m on a soft surface like grass or thick carpet. As civilised and highly developed society we have forgotten to walk barefoot. We have lost touch with our Mother Earth, we have deprived ourselves of being able to feel the terraine beneath our feet. If you would desensitised the feet of an animal it would die within days, wouldn't be able to survive.

In cultures where they don't wear shoes or wear just very basic open sandals, only 3% of population will ever experience any foot problems. In our Western shoe wearing society 75% of people at some stage of their life will have foot conditions such as bunions, hammer toes, mullet toes, tailors bunion, plantar warts or in our case PF.

I have also baught 2 pairs of barefoot shoes. The brands are Leming and Vibram five fingers. I am not able to wear them yet but I intend to gradually make the transition from the conventional footwear to barefoot shoes. But I can't emphasize this enough - the feet have to be completely painfree before any changes should be attempted. And even then it has to be a very gradual process. It took years of wearing incorrect footwear to damage them, it will take years to mend it and make transition to a more natural way of walking.

I hope all of this is helpful to you. If you have any questions please ask!

Happy Midsummer!

Hi again,

Forgot to mention the stairs. If you are walking upstairs put your entire foot on the step. Don't step just on your tiptoes. I read about a lady in another forum who had completely torn her fascia by walking upstairs on her tiptoes. Needless to say the pain is unbearable and the recovery time much, much longer.

We don't need this. :-)

Hello again!

Thank you so much for all the information. I am sure all of this will help, but I know it will be very long. I have just got back from the doctor. My test results are OK, which in a way is good as I started to get worried that I may have diabetic feet or something as the pain is so bad. I am now almost 100% sure it is PF. However my GP did not want to refer me to an orthopedics clinic yet, she says it is still too early. I would really like to have an MRI scan done so that we can see the extent of the inflammation. Because the pain is so bad and is located everywhere (heel, arch, ball, toes), I suspect that I may have ruptured the ligament as you were explaining earlier (I think I read that story from the lady who ruptured her ligament by going upstairs on her tiptoes). When only my heels were hurting I did go upstairs on my tiptoes, but the GP said that it would be very unlucky that I ruptured the ligament on both feet.

Thats why I would really like to have an MRI done, to see exactly what is going on.

Have you had one done to check how damaged your plantar fascia was ? Or to look for any other injuries. I would not be surprised if I also have other problems, such as an Achille tendon problem, as I still have a sharp pain in the back of my heel when I bend over.

I will look after my feet as much as I can, stay in bed as much as possible and see what next week brings. I am still taking Naproxen (anti-inflammatories) three times a day but it is not helping. The ibuprofen I took for two weeks was not helping either. Like you, I dont like taking medicine. I have never really had any bad health problems in the past so I never really thought about the connection between the mind and the body but I do tend to agree with you and I may consider reading a lot of stuff about all this!

Thanks for your advice about the Birkenstock sandals. I will keep them in the cupboard until my feet are ready but I imagine they wont be for a long time. It is a shame as they do feel very comfortable apart from the arch support that takes some time to get used to, I guess. I also really love the look of the new Birks sandals. I bought the Mayari ones, they look quite nice on the feet. But for now I think I will have to keep my feet hidden in trainers!

I also read that the Earth shoes are quite good for just walking outside on short distances. There are quite a lot of similar brands that do comfortable shoes for people suffering from PF but most of these brands can only be found in America, but I think you can find Earth shoes easily in the UK.

What you say about high heels makes sense when you think about it and I would give it a go but the problem is that the balls of my feet are very sore. So I dont think it would be a good idea to put all the weight on them! Plus I never actually wore any high heels in my entire life and dont know how to walk in them!

Good luck with your barefoot shoes when you start wearing them! Let me know how you get on in the next few weeks. I wish you all the best and again, many many thanks for all your advice!

Have a good time back home in Latvia!

Aurelie

If you want, I can give you one of my personal email addresses on the forum (one that I no longer use) and you could send me yours to that address to communicate (it might be easier). And I would then send you the email address I use on a daily basis. No problem if you prefer not to!

Cheers!

Aurelie

Yes, I would like that very much! Thanks!

Hi there!

I have just posted my email address to that forum but my reply is waiting to be approved because an email address was included. Lets see what happens...!

Aurelie

Maybe try to cheat the system and write your e-mail address like this: myname at yahoo. :-)

I woke up this morning thinking about your poor painful feet. I never had it that bad that the whole of my foot would be painful. The pain was very localised. At first it was in the heels which is why I could get round it wearing high heels. At the moment I get occasional ache in my arches but it's more of a discomfort and tired feet feeling than the horrible pain I used to have.

I have never had any scans done on my feet and I have not seen any specialist on NHS. I have seen a physiotherapist and an osteopath privately. They both said that because my feet were not painful when they were poking around and my calves were not tight that I would make a good recovery and no treatment was necessary.

I guess it just takes a long time to fully go away.

I wish you the best of luck with your recovery! I noticed a spontaneous, huge improvement about 2 months after I started experiencing the sympthoms. That is supposed to be what happens in the majority of the cases.

Hi ya!

Thats a good idea, I had not thought about it. My address is at hotmail dot com. Hope it works this time!

You got me very worried because both my feet are sore everywhere and it is painful and tender when I or doctors poke around. When I walk it is often like walking on glass and it can also feel like I have lots of bruises everywhere under my feet. I am so scared.

The other thing I am worried about is that I damaged the nerves under my feet when I did the icing about a week ago. As I mentioned in a previous message, it got much worse after the icing. I would ice both feet 2 to 3 times a day but I did not time it properly I think, even though I knew it can be dangerous. I would put a large ice bag (wrapped in a teatowel) under both feet while working on the computer at home. And often, I would not watch the clock very carefully and it is possible that I did it longer than 20 minutes each time, I am really not sure about this. But then again, if some nerves were damaged, the feelings would be different, surely. I heard that you loose any kind of feeling in your feet, you experience burns and cold sensations, tingling, you cant sleep at night etc. At the moment I can sleep at night again (thank god), its really when I am on my feet that the pain is unbearable.

I am seeing another GP tomorrow morning to have a second opinion and I will tell them about the icing. I will also ask them to refer me to an orthopeadic clinic. Fingers crossed.

I am so confused right now. There is nothing worse than not knowing what you have, what damages you made and how long it will take to recover if you manage to recover at all. Very scary.

Feel free to send me an email and I i'll let you know how I get on. Good luck to you too, I am glad to hear that you are making progress every day.

Have a lovely day,

Aurelie

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