Excessive physical load, as well as its incorrect distribution, can lead to defects in posture, to various injuries. This becomes the reason that the center of gravity is shifting, because of what develops such a disease as calcaneal spur. The result is a violation in the osseous-ligamentous apparatus of the foot.
With pain in the heel area of the foot, you need to pay attention to your shoes, because it can be a source of all problems. When choosing shoes, a thorough approach is necessary, since a low-quality, uncomfortable, incorrectly selected footwear can lead not only to acute pain in the heel area, but also to pain in the entire leg, and also affect the health of the spine.
Pain in the heel: causes
1. Injury to the tendon. These include the stretching of the tendons and their tearing, which occur when the load is excessive. By the way, one of the reasons for the occurrence of such injuries is the frequent wearing of shoes with high heels. Injuries of tendons can occur in people who have such a deformation of the foot as flat feet, due to prolonged walking.
2. Inflammation of the Achilles tendon or defeat of the tendon of the sole. The first leads to pain in the back region of the leg, above the heel, the second to the pain in the sole area, under the heel.
3. Contusion of calcaneus. As a result of a bruise, tissues adhering directly to the calcaneus become inflamed, and when the pressure on the heel pain becomes sharper and stronger. Often this leads to jumps from a height with a subsequent landing on the heels.
4. Infections. It is possible that the cause of severe pain in the heels are all kinds of infections, including sexually transmitted ones (for example, gonorrhea, chlamydia and the like). Postponed infections give rise to a disease such as reactive arthritis, which is characterized by acute pain in the heels, regardless of whether you are moving or are stationary. These pains do not stop even at night, which means that a dream seems almost impossible.
5. The cause of inflammation of the heels may well be such diseases as gout, psoriatic arthritis, Bekhterev's disease. In this case, pain in the calcaneal region may be a symptom of joint disease.
All of the above factors can affect the occurrence of pain in the heel, but most often pain in the calcaneal region - one of the symptoms of such well-known diseases as heel spurs and plantar fasciitis. The latter often becomes a real misfortune for people who spend a lot of time on their feet, as the cause of its appearance may well be excessive stress on the feet. To provoke pain at the plantar fasciitis can also incorrectly selected, uncomfortable shoes and a sharp increase in movement. The plantar fascia is a dense band of connective tissue passing along the sole of the foot from the heel bone to the metatarsal bones. With plantar fasciitis, inflammation of the fascia occurs at the site of its fusion with the flowing tubercle, which causes pain in the heel.
Do not exclude such a cause of pain in the calcaneal region, as heel spurs. This is the problem most often encountered by those people who come to the doctors. What is heel spur? Speaking in an accessible language, heel spur is a bone outgrowth in the calcaneal region, resulting in inflammation of the tendons. In most cases, the heel spur develops because of the calcium build-up, which gave the name to this disease (sometimes the heel spur is called the heel spine). The heel spur is characterized most often by pain in the morning hours and, as you might guess, with prolonged walking due to overload of the legs. The sharpest painful sensations appear with a sharp change in the position of the human body, that is, when a person rises sharply from a sitting position. Pain can become intolerable. Sometimes the pain in the heel begins without any apparent cause and may well subside by themselves. Sometimes the pains flow into the chronic and can last for a long period of time, for years. A person can even get used to them and practically stop noticing them.
It happens that the pain in the heels changes the gait: the person tries to transfer the load to the front of the foot, giving the rear rest. However, this can not be a solution to the problem: to get rid of the pain, you need to see a doctor. People with suspicion of the disease with a calcaneal spur are prescribed a radiograph of the foot, which can show the presence of the disease. The heel spur must be treated.
Very often, when the first signs of the disease appear, there is a desire to appeal to folk remedies: to warming up, steaming, to vinegar treatment. It is necessary to recognize that such self-treatment may well prove effective under certain conditions, however, it is not worthwhile to conduct experiments.
Traditional treatment of the disease consists of a course of physiotherapy and the taking of pain medications. But do not wait for a quick recovery, because the physiotherapy course is quite long, sometimes it lasts more than a month. There are also more modern ways of treating calcaneal spurs - shock-wave method, which for all the effectiveness still has a number of contraindications. Another effective method - X-ray therapy - has side effects. However, if success is not achieved with long-term treatment, there is another way - surgical intervention.