by Brent Hessel

How Foot Dysfunction Affects Our Bodies

The first patient I saw as a newly minted chiropractic intern was a middle-aged woman with severe headaches. After a thorough physical exam, I diagnosed a dysfunction in the upper cervical facet joints (located in the neck) as the cause. I proudly presented my exam results and diagnosis to my senior clinician for approval before starting treatment.

After patiently listening to my presentation, he asked if I had assessed the patient’s foot function. Confused, I answered no. She had headaches, not foot pain. He bluntly told me that headaches and neck dysfunction are sometimes only a symptom of an underlying, and seemingly unrelated, problem.

So we checked the woman’s feet. They were very flat, which affected her posture and gave her an abnormal gait. This created mechanical problems that ultimately caused her headaches. Once we treated her feet, her headaches improved significantly. To this day, I regularly check my patients’ feet to look for any hidden causes behind their symptoms.

One of the most common foot dysfunctions I see in my practice—and one that up to 68 percent of the population suffers from to some degree—is overpronation. Overpronation means that your foot flattens excessively when you are walking. There are various reasons why this can happen, so a full assessment is recommended to identify the specific causes.

A frequent reason for overpronation is tight calf muscles. When your calf muscles are tight, your ankles don’t move through their full range of motion. This can cause a chain reaction of problems. You may compensate by turning your feet out, or “toeing out,” in order to improve ankle motion. Unfortunately, this generates a lot of stress in your foot, which can contribute to increased pronation, bunions and calluses.

Toeing out can also increase pressure on the inside of your knee, causing pain. Your knee can rotate inwards, making you appear knocked-kneed, and over time this can lead to excessive wear of your knee joint.

Together, toeing out and inward knee rotation can make your hips rotate outward, causing tight hip muscles, hip pain or leg pain. If one hip rotates outwards, that leg may appear shorter than the other, and if the difference in length is great enough, your back may try to compensate, causing back pain.

Even though overpronation and poor ankle motion might not be painful, they can trigger a number of problems and have a negative effect on your quality of life. The first step, then, is to identify the nature of the dysfunction. Restoring normal function to your ankle and foot can go a long way to improving problems in other parts of your body.

A pioneer in the treatment of foot problems was Mahlon Locke, a medical doctor who practiced in small-town Ontario in the 1930s. Dr. Locke believed that many cases of arthritis were due to fallen arches, and that specific manipulation of the foot joints could reduce arthritis and joint pain. He felt that restoring normal foot motion created a chain reaction of improvement. He used arch supports, special shoes, medications and physical therapy to help restore the arches. His results were so amazing that he regularly treated 200 to 300 patients a day.

Today, a number of practitioners—chiropractors, massage therapists, reflexologists, podiatrists, chiropodists, physiotherapists and medical doctors—can all help restore normal foot function. Techniques such as yoga and osteopathy and simple practical approaches such as wearing proper footwear and regular stretching can also significantly improve the function of our feet.

In our quest to treat the body holistically, we should look for the cause of the pain, rather than just treating the symptoms. A careful assessment of our feet and how they affect the function of the rest of our body is a good place to start.

Brett Hessel, DC, CAFCI, graduated from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto and the Acupuncture Foundation of Canada Institute (AFCI) for medical acupuncture. Brett has also trained with the AFCI for traditional Chinese medicine and with the China Shanghai International Acupuncture Training Centre. Brett and his wife, Jennifer, currently operate the Grimshaw Chiropractic Care Centre in Grimshaw, Alberta, and the Northwest Wellness Centre in Grande Prairie, Alberta.