Did You Know Plantar Fasciitis Might Really Be Sciatica

Did you know that plantar fasciitis might really be coming from a sciatica issue? If you’ve been dealing with pain at the bottom of your foot, especially at the heel, right where the bottom of the heel is, not quite the arch, but at the heel, not into the toes over at the heel. Especially if you go to stand up and walk after you’ve been sitting for a while, or if you’ve, if you’re taking your first steps in the morning after waking up, if that bottom of the heel just kills you for several steps, and then it kind of lightens up a bit. That’s very likely, and a secondary problem from sciatica and not true plantar fasciitis.

It’s so often that when somebody that has heel pain, like this ends up going to the doctor for it, because it’s just not getting any better. It’s getting worse. Walking is just becoming very uncomfortable, especially in the morning, they go to the doctor and the doctor automatically just says, you got plantar fasciitis because it’s heel pain on the bottom. That’s what the plantar fascia is. And it is plantar fasciitis.

Then what happens after that is a very typical treatment plan rolls out from the doctor, they might send you to the physical therapists or to go get a shot or on medications. There’re all different common pathways. But if it’s not really true plantar fasciitis, it’s sciatica, they’ve completely missed the boat, and you’re going to end up having this heel pain for much longer than you expected.

Here in the clinic. We see people all the time that have been dealing with his heel pain for months, sometimes even years. And they’ve been doing plantar fasciitis treatments, they’ve use braces, they use splints, night splints, and it doesn’t get any better. And it’s because they have sciatica. And it just is presenting differently. It doesn’t look like typical sciatica that comes from the hip into the leg. And all the way into the into the foot is just heel pain that’s bothering them.

I’m going to give you today three common signs that you can find in yourself to see if your heel pain that you might think is plantar fasciitis is actually being caused by sciatica, that I’m going to talk to you about what to do different so that you can begin to get this problem to go away.

Number one, more than just heel pain.

Typically people that have this type of heel pain that’s related to a sciatica issue, they’ll have the blatant obvious heel pain, but they may also be getting pain up into the cafeteria, sometimes pain into the arch of the foot into the toes, and sometimes even pain up into the back of the thigh, in the hamstring area and even into the hip and low back. And what I find in the clinic with these patients is the most common of all of these pains, in addition to the heel pain is pain in the lower back.

It’s never really bad for in most of these patients, I’d say an 8 out of 10 patients, almost all of them, they have back pain that they’ve been dealing with off and on. But it’s just not that bad. Nothing that makes them go to the doctor, they can usually sit down and rest or take it easy for a bit and the back pain goes away. But they do have back pain. And they just it’s just not that bad.

It’s the heel pain that’s keeping them up at night. And that’s bothering them when they take their first few steps. So if you’ve got symptoms like I described in the in the arch of the foot and the toes, into the cafeteria, into the back of a thigh, back of the knee as well. And even into the hip, the butt area in the low back. That’s a sign that your heel pain could be sciatica.

Number two, a history of low back pain.

Typically, these people, as I was saying, they have low back pain, they’ve had it going on for a while. Usually people that come in with heel pain might be in their 30s 40s 50s or beyond. Well, they tell us that they have had back problems off and on for years, sometimes even a decade or more. They say back when I was in my 20s my back’s hurting for women, oftentimes I say when I got pregnant after my last child, my back was never the same and I’ve always had back pain since then. And they’ve been dealing with it off and on.

Usually they can take some medicine, they take it easy, and after a few days or a week at most, it’s they’re over it. And it’s no big deal. There’s often associated sciatica with their back pain. So they’ll say, Well, you know, when my back hurts, it’s not right in the middle of my back, I mean, I get that, but it’s kind of off to my leg as well that down into my hip, around my waist and goes down into the hip and in the butt area and into the leg even into like the back of the thigh, the back of the knee.

If you’ve had a history of that, if you’ve been dealing with that for the past few months or years even then this is a sign that your heel pain is related to your sciatica.

Number three, stretching makes it worse.

Now this is an exercise that is often given to people with plantar fasciitis. They’ll tell them to stretch out the back of their calf area stretching out the ankle. And when people that have plantar fasciitis symptoms, the heel pain that I’m talking about that’s related to sciatica, what they experienced When they go to stretch, is they’ll feel the stretch, they’ll feel the everything stretch really, really hard. But it almost kind of hurts to stretch, it’s not a good stretch.

If you think about stretching another part of your body like maybe your shoulder, or even your fingers like this, your hand and your wrist. That’s what it should feel like to stretch your ankle. Pending any problems, you might have in here, your shoulder, if you go to stretch your, your shoulder out like this, it should just feel like your muscles are being stretched.

But when you stretch out your ankle and your heel, if you’ve got a sciatica problem that’s causing your heel pain, and you feel discomfort, like it, you almost don’t want to go any harder, because it’s going to make it cry or make you really, really hurt. And you’re taking it easy on how hard you go. Or maybe you’re the type of person that just digs into it. And once it’s a stretch as hard as possible, despite the pain, you feel pain, though, I need you to acknowledge if there’s pain or not.

Because there’s a difference between pain and stress. I’m talking about if you feel us a pain while you’re stretching, that is very likely a sciatica a problem. Now if you’ve got all three of these things together, you’ve got that pain, when you stretch your heel, it sets off your heel, it might even it might not just be painful in your heel where you have your heel pain, but it could be painful up in the calf into the hamstring or if you feel that pain I’m talking about that’s one.

If you’ve got that history of lower back pain and sciatica over the past months or years, and then if you’ve also got pain up in other areas in your lower back and you’re in your thigh, your hip area, the calf the arch of the foot, if you have pain in all those areas. This is very, very likely a sciatica problem causing your heel pain, which people are thinking that might be plantar fasciitis, and you’ve got to go down a completely different treatment path for this.

Now if you’ve gone to the doctor for this, you may have seen a general physician or maybe you went to an orthopedist doctor, sometimes people go to podiatrists as well. What they’ll do for you is they’ll offer you medication though they’ll write your prescription for some pain medication that you you’ll probably take by mouth, and that might help if it’s a nerve problem.

A good way to know that this is going to help if they’re not giving you the nerve pain medication, which a common nerve pain medication is gabapentin, or Celebrex is another one. If they’re not giving you those medications, then you probably won’t hurt, it probably won’t affect the nerve pain very much. If they give you more like a muscle relaxer or an anti-inflammatory or a steroid medication and you don’t have a change in your heel pain, then it’s very likely under problem of Sciatica nerve problem causing your heel pain.

That’s a good sign for you to also pick up on that you don’t have a real plantar fasciitis problem because the steroid medications the anti-inflammatory or NSAIDs, is another name that they use for them. And then, you know, like the muscle relaxers, those will affect the muscles and the tendons and the connective tissue which plantar fasciitis is made out of, so that will affect it.

But if it’s a nerve problem and you’re not taking a nerve medication, then don’t expect to find a big difference in your pain. Other treatments and doctors will give you are injections or injected usually a steroid medication into it. If that didn’t work, you still have the heel problem. It’s probably a nerve issue. It’s not real plantar fasciitis. And that’s why it didn’t work.

And worst-case scenario with these doctors will do though end up referring you to surgery, and they’ll do a release a surgical release of the plantar fascia. The plantar fascia is a very, very thick, kind of like a tendon or ligament structure. It’s made of the same type of tissue, but it’s called fascia because it’s real thin and broad. And the purpose of it is to not let your arch fall all the way down.

But if you don’t have really massive fallen arches, and you probably don’t have a real plantar fascia problem. And what you would have seen unfortunately too much is people that have gone through with his plantar fascia surgery, they have that incision in there on the bottom of their foot, and they still have the heel pain, unfortunately, because it was a nerve problem to begin with, and they never got it appropriately diagnosed and treated.

So be careful with that if you’re on the path to having surgery, because you’ve tried all the medications and the doctors telling you I don’t know what else to do. Try what I’m going to talk about next so that you can begin to solve this problem, because it might actually be a nerve problem and not a true plantar fasciitis problem.

The other thing that doctors will do is send you to physical therapy. In physical therapy. Most physical therapists that are basically trained just don’t have the knowledge to find these nerve problems and it’s not their fault. That’s just that’s how PT school trains physical therapists. They don’t they don’t go into this level of expertise that I’m sharing here with you.

What physical therapists are trained to do out of physical therapy school is given toe exercises, they’ll typically have you scrunching a towel with your foot using your toes, they may have you picking up marbles from the floor, and then putting them into a cup and working on how you control your toes. And that will tie out your toes. And it actually may help because it, it does move the nerves a bit. But it’s not addressing the nerve problem all the way up into the body where you probably really need to affect it.

Another thing that that therapists will need to do is stretch it out the kind of stretch that I was talking about where you might reach down and grab a towel or a stretch strap, the famous green stretch traps are given out at physical therapy clinics all the time. And they’ll pull your foot upwards and stretch your foot like this.

If that’s painful for you, please stop doing that right away, you’re making your nerve problem worse, it’s not really a plantar fascia issue. They’ll have you do heel raises as well, where you tippy toe, you go up and down. And, and you might do it on a foam pad so that it works on your balance as well.

All that is generally not that harmful, maybe just the stretching is kind of harmful. But the other strengthening exercises, the marble exercises, the towel exercises, they’re not really that harmful, they’re more just not the best thing for you if you’ve got a nerve problem.

So what do you do then? And if you’re in physical therapy right now, how are you going to break into your therapist, so you might have a nerve problem? Well, for one thing, share this video with a therapist, and they can look me up and find all my credentials and see what they think about me and form their own opinion and hopefully, learn something new about treating plantar fasciitis patients for nerve problems. But you have to take responsibility for your own heel pain.

Here’s what I suggest you do, you need to start fixing your lower back and your core problem. If you’re watching this video, and you’ve had a history of lower back pain and sciatica issues, you’re probably going to be quick to admit that you have a weak core weak abs. And you have you have avoided working on your abs or maybe you’ve actually worked on them, but you’ve been working on them incorrectly. And that could be part of the problem as well.

We have people in here that are very strong cross-fitters power lifters athletes, and they do actually do a lot of core exercises, but they’re doing them wrong, and they’ve been working into an imbalance. And that’s what’s causing their Sciatica a problem. So you’ve got to fix your core. Now, in this video, it’s going to be too much if I go into exactly which exercises to do.

But I’ve got a video for you. If you check out the link in the description, you’ll get to the video. In that video, you’ll see exercises to do for people with sciatica problems, I might throw another one in there that’s got exercises for people to do with lower back pain problems, and you pick the one that’s best for your specific situation. start fixing the lower back pain, the sciatica problem in a watch your heel pain magically begins to disappear over the coming weeks and months. It’s incredible.

We see it here in the clinic all the time. And it’s almost a bit of a battle with some patients where we have to tell them, hey, you’ve got this heel pain problem. And I know you’ve been to doctors, you’ve had medications, injections, they’re talking about doing plantar fasciitis release surgery on you. You’ve been in physical therapy been doing the toe marble exercises and all the stretches. And I know it hasn’t been getting better oh you bought the night splints, you’re wearing that that sock that pulls you up like this and stretches your poor ankle and nerve out all night long. And none of it is work.

In fact, you might have even got a little bit worse. Well, that’s got to all stop and I need you to focus on working on your back your core really your abs usually and your Sciatica a problem working your back problem and your Sciatica problem, and nine times out of 10 that will fix this heel pain for good. It’ll give you long term relief of that heel pain, this and you should see a correlation.

The stronger you get in your core, the better your foot will feel your heel pain, it will if you thought this video was helpful for you and you’ve kind of been down the pathway that I just described here. And you’re thinking that we might be able to help you out with your heel problem. With our hands-on techniques. There are all kinds of joints that we can look at in your hips and your back and your knees, your feet that can also be contributing to your heel pain or sciatica and back problem. And it does help tremendously to make sure that you have a guide to get you on the right path to fixing this heel problem for good.

If you’re considering hiring us to help you at least want to begin that conversation go up to the top of our website here and find the button that says cost and availability. Once you click on that, you’ll get to a page where you can leave us your details. Once you leave us your details. We want to hear all about your heel pain story.

One of my staff will call you back as soon as they get a chance. And we just want to have a conversation and talk on the phone. We’ll give you all the time that you need to explain your heel pain problem. And then once we can see if it’s the right type of heel pain that we can help you with. Then we’ll talk about the next steps for helping you out with your heel pain. I hope that you have a wonderful day and I really hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a wonderful day. Bye