The Top 9 Treatments That Make Heel Pain From Plantar Fasciitis Worse

Plantar fasciitis treatments are often painful and don’t improve the heel pain very much. Even treatment guided by healthcare professionals tends to be focused on treating the symptoms and not the root problem. Sometimes patients are even guided to do treatments that are very painful and end up keeping the pain their longer than it needs to be.

In this video, I’m going to show you the top nine treatments that make heel pain from plantar fasciitis worse, an important distinction to make about our approach towards treating plantar fasciitis is that I treat it like a sprained ankle or like a sprain to tissue under the heel of the foot. After all, it’s made up of nearly the same kind of material that ligaments are made from. So it should be treated that way.

So if you think about it, like a sprain, that it makes sense not to do some of these things that I’m going to tell you next. A runner stretch is often given to patients who have plantar fasciitis problems, and it looks like this, you stand in front of a wall holding on to for balance, put the problem foot back and then start to bend the knee to get a stretch in this area. And most people feel a big stretch happening in the calf muscle and sometimes there’s a stretch in the plantar fascia too.

Although this can feel good because of the stretch sensation you’re getting in the moment. You don’t want to stretch out the plantar fascia more because it’s an injured ligament. It’s like a ligament although it’s called fascia, it’s made of the same tissue. So you don’t want to over stretch an already stretched piece of connective tissue like the plantar fascia.

Doing this potentially is going to make your plantar fasciitis problems stay there longer than it needs to. Number two is night splints. These are a soccer a two that you put on your ankle and your lower leg and then it holds your foot up in this position with a strap that attaches to itself. So you’re the idea is you’re going to sleep with your foot in a stretch position. And this treatment is often recommended by doctors podiatrists, and physical therapists.

And I think that the idea behind the treatment is not good because you’re putting more stretch on the plantar fascia, which is going to further injure it potentially plus, most patients doing the night splint treatments don’t like it, they end up feeling pretty bad. They do get an improvement at times. But I think it’s questionable if the improvements really coming from wearing the night splint or other things that they’re doing, that are possibly allowing them to heal.

In my book, doing a night splint stretch just goes against the principles of healing when it comes to trying to get connective tissue to heal for the long term. Number three tau crunches, this is a common exercise you’ll see in physical therapy clinics, and they’ll send this home with patients. And the idea is you’re trying to scrunch a towel or grab a towel with your toes and bunch it up on your foot.

And usually we’ll put it on a smooth surface I’ve got this clipboard here, tile floors are often used or wooden floors. And this is a good idea at first thought because you’re trying to get the toes to work. But it doesn’t really push strength a whole lot. And it doesn’t also teach you how to use your toes when you’re walking and standing moving around like you normally shouldn’t be using them. So this isn’t a bad exercise to start with. But it’s not one that you’d be hanging out with indefinitely.

While your plantar fasciitis problem is still there, you eventually need to progress to stronger exercises, exercises that give you more resistance entire out your feet more. And there also needs to be more education on exactly how to use your toes. That brings me to the fourth exercise, which is a marble pickup, it’s usually a variation of this exercise. Let me get this out of your way. And what happens I don’t have marbles here because we don’t do this exercise.

But you’ll see a bunch of marbles dumped onto the floor. And then they’ll usually be a cup or a bowl. And the idea is you’re grabbing pretend you’re grabbing your grab, you’re grabbing marbles with your toes like that, and then you’re moving it over and dropping it into a cup or a bowl. And this is usually done with the first two or three toes.

So people are usually great at grabbing a marble one at a time with just the first two or three toes. And what often happens is that third, fourth and fifth toes don’t get as good of a workout. People naturally find the easiest way to do this. And so they’ll find the toes that are the strongest or that they have the most control.

But the way that toes work when you’re standing as they should all be able to grab and grip the ground very well. each one independently. Of course, your little toe is going to be a little weaker than your big toe. But they should all be able to go through their full range of motion. And watch when you curl your toes here go ahead and curl her toes curl very well.

But it’s often the case that if you have a plantar fasciitis problem, there’s one toe that doesn’t come up what one two will kind of stick up the third, fourth or fifth toe are usually the ones and that one needs to be guided into full range of motion in order to heal properly for the plantar fasciitis. Number five is using stiff or hard insoles. When using insoles or orthotics is what people in the medical field called them.

These are the things that you shove inside your shoe like this in order to give your foot and your heel in this case more cushion, it just doesn’t make sense to put something hard and stiff. As you see some of these that are custom made especially, they’re very hard, there’s no padding on the outside edge of them, what you should be doing is using a very soft cushiony insole, it’s going to automatically feel better.

If you feel better in that kind of an insole, then that’s a clear sign that it’s helping you out. Most patients often say that when they have plantar fasciitis, it feels like they have like a lack of padding on the bottom of their heel. I had one patient describe it as they feel like they have a flat tire. Every time they step they don’t have very much cushion on there.

And so it just makes sense to use some sort of cushioning insole in order to support if you put a hard insole there, it mimics stepping on a hard floor. And even if it’s a custom made insole by a professional, you have to consider how you feel it should not hurt. I’ve even had patients come to me tell me that they were told that these insoles are supposed to hurt their feet. And I always distinguish with them.

Was it really hurting like it was painful or were your feet tired, because there’s a difference between the two tiredness you can recover from as soon as you get off your feet. Pain is different. That means it’s something’s becoming irritated. And I’m okay with your feet getting tired, especially if you do have a different kind of shoe on.

Or if you’re walking barefoot for instance, it’s just going to make your foot muscles work differently, which is going to tire them out. But if you’re adding more compression and more stretch to that plantar fascia and it’s becoming irritated, then you’re being set up for this problem to last longer than it should.

Number six is waiting to lose weight often have patients say Well, I’m not going to start treatment yet because I need to lose 30, 40, 50 pounds. And so let me go work on that first. Now not saying that losing weight is a bad idea. I think it’s a fantastic idea.

I think that if you can’t if you have weight to lose, and if you can bring that way down, it’s going to help you on so many fronts, of course your cardiovascular health, your overall health, it’s going to make you absolutely healthier. And I’m not saying don’t do it.

I’m just saying don’t wait on treating the root problem because you’re trying to lose weight first, you can work on both at the same time. And the reason this is a bad idea is waiting to work on the root problem because you’re trying to lose weight is because then the problem festers, your plantar fascia potentially becomes worse and more chronically irritated that it’s going to take you even longer to correct the problem naturally, because you waited so long, because we all know that weight loss is rarely ever a quick thing and you’re talking months if not maybe a year or more to meet the goals.

And it’s a roller coaster you go up and down. And although weight loss is probably going to make your heel feel better. There’s other things you can do like addressing the root problem by doing the right exercises in order to get relief in that heel pain from plantar fasciitis.

Number seven is relying on pain medications every day, taking pain relieving medications like Tylenol, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, proccing, diclofenac, any of those kinds of pain medications in the short term may be beneficial for you to get the pain levels down to a tolerable amount where you can sleep at night, or be able to do things that you just have to do because you’re responsible for them. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take pain medication, it’s it may be right for you to do so.

And your doctor may be recommending it where you can run into trouble is when you’re relying on pain medications every day. Besides the harmful side effects that some pain medications have, of course on your kidneys, your liver, your other internal organs, your brain, like with waiting to lose weight, the root problem of plantar fasciitis is not being addressed by this pain medication, you’re not getting stronger in the right muscles in order to fix the root problem and get true long term relief.

So I always tell my patients hey, it’s cool. If you take pain medication, as long as your doctor is cool with it, and you’re not having any side effects from it. I’m not going to tell you to stop necessarily you decide when that needs to happen with the discussion with your doctor. But I’m here to help you with addressing the root problem so that you can not have to rely on any pain medications you don’t feel like you need them anymore.

Number eight is getting a cortisone injection for your plantar fasciitis. This is the most common type of injection getting a cortisone steroid shot. It’s an anti inflammatory and a pain relieving medication that’s injected into the area.

They actually are very effective at taking the pain away or at least taking some of the pain down into manageable amount so that you can do normal things without so much heel pain, but it’s well known that you won’t get more than three per year from your doctor because there’s a serious side effect to getting cortisone shots.

It actually degrades connective tissue like ligaments the plantar fascia is affected similarly, because it’s made out of the same material, so if you have too many cortisone injections, it starts to break down and your risk for tearing your plantar fascia starts to go up significantly.

After your third injection within a year, now there are times that I tell a patient who’s in a lot of pain, go ahead and go get an injection because we’re starting treatment here. So you’re working on fixing the root problem if you need the injection so that you can get up in the middle of the night without having to limp into the bathroom, or you can get up in the morning and make it through the morning routine without limping all over the place.

That may be a good thing to do. But just don’t count on getting the second or third one to rely on these types of injections every so many months, you need to make sure you address the root problem so that you just have one maybe at most two injections, and you’re not dealing with plantar fasciitis problems anymore because you address the root problem, and you can count on it not coming back here in the next few months or in a year.

Number nine is surgery for plantar fasciitis. This often creates other problems besides the plantar fasciitis issue in plantar fasciitis, it attaches right here at the hook of this bone on the heel bone. That plantar fascia runs up and fans out into all the toes in the surgery that’s commonly done is a plantar fasciotomy, which means they cut the plantar fascia so that it’s no longer able to function, which means it’s taken out of the equation. And it is no longer going to cause your problem.

But the trade off, think about it, you’ve lost a major structure to stabilize your foot. Now, what the heck is going to stabilize your foot. Now you’re going to run into other problems. And we often see is people’s foot bones around here, they often start to shift around and move. And that causes problems people get tendinitis issues and other areas. I think the trade off for this surgery is significant.

So you’ve got to really weigh the risks, the pros and the cons. And surgeons aren’t always telling you the potential downsides of having the plantar fasciotomy. And if you’re going in with severe plantar fasciitis, it’s going to be hard to tell a surgeon know when they can tell you, this is going to get rid of your plantar fascia pain, but what they don’t always tell you is you’re also going to be set up with a bunch of other potential problems in your foot and ankle.

Not only that, but if you lose that arch of your foot because that’s often what happens when you get that plantar fasciotomy people’s arches collapse significantly. It starts to affect the knee which can set you up for knee arthritis, knee ligament problems and meniscus tear all kinds of other issues up into the knee joint even the hip and the back.

Now a surgery might be right for you. It just depends on your specific situation. But you’ve got to weigh the risks and I would strongly encourage you to pursue addressing the root problem here on this channel. We’ve got many videos on helping people with plantar fasciitis problems go down into the description below and you’ll find a playlist titled plantar fasciitis help where you can find more of our videos about plantar fasciitis thanks so much for watching.

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