Get Square With Your Feet

by Dorothy Foltz-Gray
Reprinted from Arthritis Today

What Years Bring
Feet age as the rest of our body does. Around our mid-40s, joints creak and joint tissues stiffen. Our feet begin to lose their once-plump cushion. “If you think of a honeycomb, that’s what the anatomy of your heel looks like, honeycomb-shaped sacs filled with fat,” explains Glenn Pfeffer, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in feet and ankles, and assistant clinical professor at the University of California in San Francisco. “Each sac is a beautifully constructed pillow made to decrease the stress walking puts on our bodies. Without those pillows, it can begin to feel like you’re walking on pebbles.”

Our feet also change size from fluid retention, loosening ligaments and the flattening effects of gravity and weight. Heredity pops up as well – a predisposition to flattened arches, for example, or pronated feet (feet that turn toward the inside of the arch, placing abnormal stress on the foot muscles).

Years of wearing the wrong shoes also take their toll. Problems can crop up like bunions (an enlargement of the bone and tissue around the joint of the big toe), hammertoes (a buckling, or contraction, of the toes) or neuromas (an irritated nerve often between the third and fourth toes). As we enter our fifth and sixth decades, our feet are in our face, so to speak.