Foot Talk Fridays : How we correct FLAT FEET

Subtitles:

Most of the patients that come to see us at Dubai Podiatry Centre complain about having a flat feet and in fact their feet are not flat in most cases even though when you stand and show and exhibit a flatfoot. Most of the reason the foot appears flat here is actually because the ankle joint here leans in and when the ankle joints leans in, it depresses and flattens these arch here. You can test this yourself by raising your foot off the ground and crossing your legs and if an arch forms you don’t have flat feet. But how can we help your foot to stay straight like this when you stand without the arch from dropping and what we have to do engineering wise is control this joint here. There is a bone in here called the talus bone, when the talus bone leans in and when it leans in causes the arch to collapse.Traditionally orthotics and insoles have been used to try and raise the arch of the foot. But now we know that in most cases the origin of the problem doesn’t come from here, it comes from the ankle so we make something exactly the shape of the foot and this is called a gyps cast, so we take a gyps cast to get the exact the shape of your foot so it should be extremely comfortable. But even if we make a fantastic insole or orthotic exactly the shape of your foot and you stand on it the foot will still lean in because the problem comes from your ankle joints. So what we have to do is we have to measure how many degrees your foot leans in. When we measure precisely how many degrees your foot leans in we count your balance that to tilt your feet straight. When we tilt the foot straight, the ankle joint from above also become straight. The ankle joints, ligaments on the medial and lateral sites start to tighten just like you do when you get braces for the teeth.

And we measure this depending on your activity levels and what age you are and align your foot 5 degrees every time. So that’s why it’s important to come in and see us so that we can measure your arch and the position of your foot leaning in. So what we can do is we make an orthotic exactly the shape of your foot and we add a medial wedge to tilt you. So if you’re 30 degrees were going to tilt you 30 degrees straight and then what we ask you to do is get a very firm sole shoe. It’s very important when you put an orthotic inside your shoes, the shoes is correct. If you use a very soft sole shoe, the foot might still be able to lean in because the foundation of the shoes is too soft . But in this case the shoe is perfect because the foundation the shoe is very very strong.So as the foot leans in and or tries to lean in, you have an arch support that tries to stop that but more importantly you have a medial wedge so your can foot cannot lean at all and to make sure that you get a true results you should have a very firm sole shoe as well that we ask you to wear and when you put inside your shoes, you remove the sponge liner that comes with your shoes because even if you put your orthotic on top of it you can lose a few degrees so we make sure that the outcome is going to be as true and successful as we can possibly get it in collaboration with our patients.