4 Winter Foot Worries If You Have Diabetes
If you have diabetes, caring for your feet is always important. In the winter, that means taking some extra steps. Here are four areas worth your attention.
Proper Footwear is Essential to Overall Health, Here’s Why…
Proper Footwear is Essential to Overall Health
How much thought do you give to the shoes you buy?
Do you buy shoes based on style; how comfortable they are; how suitable they are for work or sports?
What about health – do you factor in how your shoes may affect the rest of your body?
Footwear has a massive impact on overall health. When choosing new shoes, you need to consider how the wrong footwear choice can negatively affect your health, as much as how comfortable, supportive shoes can improve it.
For every second, minute and hour you spend on your feet, your shoes provide an important layer of protection, so it’s vital that you spend time finding the best and most supportive footwear for you.
Custom Orthotics in Chicago
You only have to look at how beneficial custom orthotics in Chicago are for your feet, to get an idea of why proper footwear is essential to overall health. Custom orthotics are a specially designed insert for shoes that helps to treat a wide range of foot and ankle problems. The inserts can reduce foot pain, treat deformities, increase ankle support and improve foot and ankle function.
Orthotics are a very popular treatment for many common conditions, including flat feet, bunions, heel spurs, plantar fasciitis, diabetes, hammer toes and arthritis.
It’s amazing how just adding a custom insert into your shoe can reduce the pain of so many conditions, but to prevent pain and discomfort in the first place, the shoes you wear are incredibly important…
Prevent Foot & Ankle Injuries
Foot and ankle injuries can greatly hinder your mobility, cause you to miss work and limit the sports and activities that you can enjoy for weeks, months and even years. Many common injuries can be avoided by wearing the correct footwear.
If your shoes don’t fit properly, if you wear the wrong shoes for an activity or your shoes are poorly designed, then you could be on the fast track to sustaining a serious injury. Shoes with high heels, no fastenings or no grip can hinder your ability to walk and affect your balance. With impaired balance, it’s much easier to fall and injure yourself.
Other injuries and conditions can also arise from improper footwear, such as ingrown toenails and Athlete’s foot. Tight shoes add pressure to the toes and push them together, creating an unhealthy environment and potentially causing repetitive trauma.
Bunion Prevention Tips
- Bunions are another condition that can develop when people wear footwear that doesn’t fit them properly. A bunion is a hard and often sore deformity that appears at the base of the big toe, which causes the toe to point inwards.
- Wearing the correct shoe size is one of the best tips to avoid the development of bunions. Toes should be able to move freely inside the shoe, without being constricted. To prevent bunions, shoes with a high heel should be avoided.
Foot Callus Protection
- The development of calluses (thickened skin) and corns (a type of small callus) is yet another risk of wearing tight or high-heeled shoes that cause pressure. Calluses can also develop when a person wears shoes that are loose or shoes that are poorly designed with seams that are able to rub against the skin.
- Any kind of friction or pressure can result in corns and calluses, both of which can be irritating and painful. Wearing proper footwear and keeping your feet clean are two very easy ways to help prevent corns and calluses. Custom orthotics are also a great way to protect the foot from pressure and friction and reduce the risk of corns and calluses developing.
Plantar Fasciitis Injury Prevention
- Non-supportive shoes are one of the main causes of plantar fasciitis, a common inflammation of the plantar fascia, which is a band of tissue located between the toes and heel. This condition can cause pain, swelling and significant discomfort.
- The inflammation can arise from regularly walking on hard, flat surfaces, without the correct footwear to support the foot. Treating plantar fasciitis often involves footwear that supports the foot arch, with a slight heel to alleviate stress. In cases where abnormalities in the structure of a person’s foot are the cause of plantar fasciitis, custom orthotics can be a very effective treatment.
Contact Vittori Foot & Ankle Specialist in Chicago
Choosing the perfect footwear – shoes that are not too tight, too loose, too high or poorly designed – is not always easy, but don’t worry, the experts at Vittori Foot & Ankle Clinic in Chicago are here to help you.
Contact Vittori Foot & Ankle Specialists for professional footwear advice to prevent problems that can affect your overall health and to discuss getting custom orthotics to treat existing conditions. With expert advice and specialist orthotics, you can improve the health of your whole body by taking care of your feet!
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