If I have an accessory navicular bone in my foot and I do the contrast bath routine, will that fix it? Well, that is a great question and that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
Today I was doing a consultation with a runner who has a thing called an accessory navicular. The navicular bone is on the inside of your foot, several things attached to that including the posterior tibial tendon that helps you supinate your foot and make it a rigid lever. The tibialis anterior tendon also attaches to it which helps you pull your foot upward so you don’t trip over your toes when you’re running uphill.
Well, there is a thing that can happen called an accessory navicular and she had one of those and she thought that it was much more swollen than normal. She had basically rolled her ankle and banged that bone into a rock and then she was having some swelling there. So, let’s talk about what this is.
If we look at the foot from above like you’re looking down at it, you have the first metatarsal, second metatarsal, third, fourth, and fifth. Then you have the cuneiform bones and the cuboid bone and the navicular. Now the navicular bone when it develops forms as two separate and distinct pieces. You have the body of the navicular, the main part of it over here, and then you also have a separate piece called the navicular tuberosity.
That bone fuses together and becomes solid when you’re a child but in some people, it doesn’t fuse all the way together and, in her case, now she has swelling over the accessory navicular and she did this thing called the contrast bath routine to reduce the inflammation and it suddenly got smaller. So, all that swelling over the skin went away.
How can that happen? How in the world can your accessory navicular, that bone that is sticking out, go away, It doesn’t. Here’s what happened. She basically banged the bone into a rock.
Now, that caused soft tissue swelling to pooch out further over the accessory navicular. So, then she did the contrast bath routine that caused that swelling to go away and that skin to shrink down and it looked like her accessory navicular completely resolved. It didn’t.
It just got rid of the swelling that was over it. I’m sure if you had x-rays before and after her bone would be in exactly the same position. There is one way that it might actually help it. If you actually rolled your ankle and you really did bang this thing badly and you expectedly had what would be like the equivalent of a sprain of the soft tissue in between those two pieces of bone, the body of the navicular and the navicular tuberosity, in that case it’s effectively sprained and it hurts because there’s swelling in and around that little sprain. If you do the contrast bath routine, the swelling goes down, it may feel much better. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily completely healed.
But if you did that routine, if you iced it or did the contrast bath routine and it felt way better in just a day or two, the sprain doesn’t heal that fast. Removing the inflammation and having it hurt less because there’s less distention of the tissue changes that fast. That is the way that you can tell the difference between two of these different kinds of conditions.
One of them is actually from tissue damage. The soft tissue is torn between the two pieces of bone. That will not get better and feel better in two days of icing it or doing contrast bath therapy. However, if you just have pain that is caused from distention of the tissue in that area, well, that will improve very quickly when you remove that excess fluid. That is one of the ways that you can tell the difference between these two different kinds of conditions when you’re a runner with this kind of foot pain.
If you like this episode, please like it, please subscribe. If you have ankle pain like this that stemmed from an ankle sprain and you want to check out why you’re trying to figure out why you still have that pain later, come check out the Ankle Pain Masterclass. It’s where I do a deep dive into the strategies I use with runners like this who have ankle sprains and get this kind of pain later. You can get it for free at www.docontherun.com/anklesprainmasterclass. So, come check it out and I’ll see you in the training.
«« #940 Toenail fungus oral medication liver testing options for runners | #942 When is it okay to take NSAIDs with a running injury »» |