Today on the doc on the run podcast we’re talking about whether or not you can get a stress response in your good foot when you’re wearing a fracture walking boot on your bad foot to treat a stress fracture.
Today’s episode comes from a live group coaching call where recovering runners get to ask me anything they want, so let’s listen in.
Patient:
My good foot from my last stress fracture, I believe actually acquired some sort of stress response.
Dr. Segler:
Yeah, so think about this. I mean we’ve all been through. Think about what happens when you’re doing a marathon and either your shoe lace are too loose or you have shoe that are too new. or you a run-through you know like where some kids spray a garden hose to try to cool their body off and you you run through it. You know when a kid run through the hose to get cooled off and your feet get wet. And and then you get a blister and you notice like twenty miles in your marathon that your foot hurts and you know you have a blister.
So what do you do? You spend more time on the other foot.
When you look at limping like I remember when I was in residency one of the students asked the director like what exactly is limping and the director explained, he said all it really means is if you actually look and you videotape somebody who’s limping and you describe it to someone who is blind and has never seen that happen, the best way to describe it is that you spend more time on the non injured foot. So you actually do if you actually measure the amount of time when you’re walking, when you limp and you put your foot down and you quickly pick it back up. You actually spend more time on the other foot which transfers more stress to the other foot.
If you get a blister, stress fracture, a tendonitis issue, many people lined up with a different issue on the other foot not necessarily the same issue but some other issue because you get soreness because you immediately, dramatically increase in that total time that your body weight is actually on the other foot. So that’s very very common.
Fortunately, most of the time when you have let’s say your left foot gets a stress fracture and your right foot starts to kind of ache as if it’s developing a stress reaction, as soon as the other foot starts to calm down or decrease your activity, the lesser of the two injured feet let’s say the one with the stress reaction starts to calm down very very quickly and I wouldn’t I wouldn’t put you in another fracture walking boot or something on your kind of angry foot that’s not really injured. That’s pretty common.
Patient:
Thank you, that was basically was the follow-up of the other foot, the other good foot.
Dr. Segler:
Okay
Patient:
I appreciate your answers
Dr. Segler:
Okay great!
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