Foot Talk Fridays : Clawed Toes

Subtitles:

Welcome to Foot Talk Fridays!

We have quite a lot of requests asking to talk about Clawed Toes, so we’ll discuss the bio-mechanics of clawed toes. The toes are very similar to the fingers, but with clawed toes the ligaments here in the transverse arch first of all causes the transverse arch to collapse. A transverse arch is this area here of the foot so it’s the same as the knuckles in the hands here and it’s the same the foot here. When the transverse arch drops flat or drops negative arch, the toes then start to retract.

The tendons along the top of the toes start to pull quite tightly, and there’s muscle that comes up and attaches into the knee and it starts to contract. It’s to do with an imbalance of the tone of the ligaments, tendons and muscles on the top of the foot compared to the sole of the foot. It really all starts with the foundation of the foot which is the structure of the bones of the foot. The longer you leave the foot untreated, the more retracted the toes become soft tissue. So the younger that we can catch this, the earlier we can correct the position of the foot, and the faster that we can correct it. We would use an orthotic underneath your foot to lift the ball of your foot, when we lift the ball of your foot it stretches out the toes and it also stretches out the tendons.  We will do this normally over three phases.