Foot pain can prevent you from getting the most out of life. Just as a foot injury can be severely debilitating, so too can pain in this particularly important area of your body. Our feet are responsible for bearing weight as we move and, until we all perfect walking on our hands, they are our only way of getting around. Accordingly, if you are suffering from pain here, you will not be able to do anything without being acutely aware of it. You cannot bandage up your feet like a broken arm and keep them out of use while going about your daily life.
But of course, what could be causing your foot pain can be any number of things. Unfortunately, feet are a part of our body that suffer a lot of stress. They bear our weight, they get stuffed into shoes, they can develop blisters and other skin issues, they can be injured by underfoot hazards in all sorts of ways and, on top of that, they are the part of our body most likely to collide with something we haven’t seen. Accordingly, a comprehensive anti-foot pain guide would probably be the length of a book.
What Causes Foot Pain?
As just mentioned, any number of things! However, there are some sources of foot pain which are considerably more common than others. Here follows some of the most common causes and some top tips for dealing with the resultant pain:
Wearing the Wrong Sized Footwear
Footwear can be “wrong” for a few reasons. Wearing the wrong sized footwear is a sure way to develop foot pain and, for that matter, even wearing shoes that do not fit the feet well or which take some time to be broken in can also be the culprit. You would think this would be obvious, but a recent study revealed that 90% of American women wear shoes that don’t fit. It might not be immediately obvious that shoes do not fit (unless you are squeezing into heels that they didn’t have in your size). Rather, ill-fitting shoes are usually only slightly incorrect in size, but this makes all the difference. To avoid this, have your feet measured every couple of years, and make sure you’re wearing exactly the right sized shoes.
Wearing the Wrong Type of Shoes
A pretty ridiculous hypothetical illustrates this point well – you wouldn’t wear flip flops on a construction site, and you wouldn’t wear steel toe-capped boots when paddling in the sea. You have to wear the right shoes for the right circumstances. As well as causing foot pain, failing to do so can also cause all sorts of other problems, from excess foot odor to skin issues. ShoeFresh, a shoe care company specializing in foot odor sprays, say that caring for your shoes is also important as degraded or damaged shoes also come under this “wrong type” category.
Injury
Of course, foot injury will cause foot pain. Nevertheless, they are not all treated in the same way and sometimes underlying conditions can make the pain significantly worse. To combat this, it is worth getting a full and thorough diagnosis and then following medical advice on how to ameliorate the pain. This could involve medicines, but it could also involve getting into good foot care habits such as resting or wearing certain types of shoes. Sometimes, a professional is needed to tell the cause – and help remedy – of your foot pain.
Ultimately, even minor foot pain is not something you should put up with. Follow that tactic, and minor will soon become major. Foot pain is always something addressed sooner rather than later.
