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So I was reading the paper (yes, the actual paper newspaper) - and I came across this article which I thought was informative and timely. We are seeing more and more people in the store recently that have gone back to work or are working from home - but still spending more time on their feet than during the pandemic. Now that they know their feet don't have to hurt, it's been quite the eye opener for many why they have pain all of a sudden.
I wanted to share this article - and also interject some of (my opinions) - here and there. I will be posting this over the next week as it is a little long and there is a lot of information to digest.
(Please see the reference for the original post)
In March of 2020, Krista Fahs began working from home. As she sidled up to her desk, the 53-yearold sales associate for a computer distributor put aside her usual sneakers. She found herself doing laundry, playing with her cat and even visiting neighbors without putting on shoes. “I was barefoot all the time,” she said. (In Las Vegas everything is on concrete, but also hard floors are popular so it can be a double whammy on your feet.)
A few months into working from home, she began to feel a twinge of heel pain, but disregarded it until last month, when it got too intense to ignore. Even as she lay in bed, the throbbing wouldn’t stop. “‘This is ridiculous,’” she remembered thinking, “I didn’t even know how I was going to fall asleep.”
The beginning of the pandemic coincided with a steep decline in foot trauma, said Dr. Robert Lee, chief of podiatric foot and ankle surgery at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center, but his practice quickly repopulated with patients like Fahs who complained about foot pain. “I was like, ‘Aha, so this is the effect of the pandemic on feet across the country,’” he said.
There is no hard data on the increase in foot pain, but Dr. James Christina, the executive director of the American Podiatric Medical Association, said it’s been a clear trend for many of his 12,000 members.
Members like Dr. Rock Positano, the co-director of the Non-surgical Foot and Ankle Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who has seen foot pain increase so much — 20 to 30 percent — that he called the phenomenon “pandemic foot.”
Now that spring is here, mandates are relaxing and people are eager to get their pre-pandemic bodies and hobbies back, they are hitting the pavement, said Dr. James Hanna, a podiatrist and president of the New York State Podiatric Medical Association. Many are exacerbating existing foot injuries or creating new ones. (The trick is to have proper footwear with the correct support and sometimes footwear specific to the activity you are participating in.)
“People thought they could just return to where they left off or try something they hadn’t tried in a couple years,” he said, “but their feet aren’t prepared for what their bodies want to do.”
By instituting a few simple measures, Hanna assures owners of achy feet everywhere that foot pain can be alleviated as well as prevented.
to be continued......
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