Do you have back pain? Do you have narrow feet or ill-fitting shoes?
I have narrow feet, so narrow in fact, that I couldn’t stand on them until after I was two years old! I would just roll over! I remember getting braces on my legs to help me stand up. We had this great shoe store that had narrow sizes. These days it seems a lot harder to find good narrow shoes that aren’t too expensive.
The thing is that if you’re shoes don’t fit right, at the very least, you’ll be crabby! At worst, you can have back, foot, and neck problem.Some common conditions include Plantar Fasciitis, which I had and it lasted about a year. Other conditions include corns, bunions, blisters, and calluses. According to CVS, these are more common in women. CVS also says that ill-fitting shoes can even cause hammer toes, heel pain, and athlete’s foot. And don’t forget about big toe arthritis and bone spurs.
The National Institute on Aging indicates that clues to your overall health can be indicated by foot health. If any of the 26 bones in the human foot is out of wack or not aligned properly, it negatively affects the rest of your body. So, yeah, wow, even a tiny bone, when unaligned, can put your body at risk for health issues.
According to Foot Health Facts, the pain in your lower back may be linked to your feet.They emphasize that foot problems could cause additional problems in your hips, knees, and ankles. It’s my personal opinion that my narrow feet and difficulty finding shoes that fit well are partially to blame for my anterior cruciate ligament snapping in half during a soccer game (search images of anterior cruciate).
That event was not only traumatizing at 14, but has affected my mind and body ever since. This is the same injury that Robert Griffin, III sustained twice in his lifetime, once during his tenure with the Washington Redskins (though I don’t know if he only tore his ligament versus it snapping in half).
Needless to say, it is apparent that foot health is imperative. This is probably even more poignant for people with narrow feet.
Sources: CVS Health Information Center, accessed online June 16, 2016.
National Institute on Aging as noted online in Wikipedia.
Foot Health Facts: Healthy Feet for An Active Life, accessed online on June 17, 2017.
Written by Leslie Jones, MS. Jones earned a double major in Philosophy and Psychology from Guilford College, and a Master’s degree in Technical Communication from North Carolina State University.
