Have you ever started to walk only to feel a searing, gripping pain on the bottom of your foot? If that pain is recurring, you might have a common condition called plantar fasciitis.
Plantar fasciitis can be so painful that it limits your activities, so if you experience this problem, you’re probably wondering what to do to treat it. Discover from Ryan Golub, DPM, and Zachary Flynn, DPM, AACFAS, the podiatrists from Arizona Foot Health in Phoenix, Arizona, whether plantar fasciitis goes away on its own and what your treatment options are.
The hallmark symptom of plantar fasciitis is severe, stabbing pain in the bottom of your heel and foot. This is because plantar fasciitis is an injury to the tissue in the plantar fascia band that extends from your heel across the bottoms of the foot.
When your plantar fascia is inflamed or torn from stress, you feel pain when walking. The pain usually is at its worst when you take the initial steps after a rest and gets better with time as you keep moving.
Plantar fasciitis can get better without treatment, but recovery is often a long and painful process. If you don’t get treatment for plantar fasciitis, it can take a minimum of several months to feel better.
Furthermore, more serious cases of plantar fasciitis may not get better without treatment. This means letting your plantar fasciitis heal on its own is, at a minimum, a long and painful process, and at worst, you’re at risk of the condition not going away.
The excellent news is many effective treatments are available now for plantar fasciitis. Most of the time, your pain can resolve without any surgical methods.
For milder cases of plantar fasciitis, our team can treat your pain with gentle exercises that stretch your plantar fascia. They can also prescribe custom orthotics and splints that offer support and pain relief.
If these treatments don’t work on their own, our team offers two revolutionary treatment methods, amniotic growth factor injections, and pulse wave therapy. Amniotic growth factor injections are a form of regenerative medicine that uses amniotic tissue to heal and regrow the damaged tissues in your plantar fascia.
These quick and noninvasive injections offer long-lasting healing that resolves your pain and makes it more difficult for plantar fasciitis to return. The number of sessions you need depends on the severity and duration of your plantar fasciitis and gets recommended by our team at your consultation.
Pulse wave therapy works in a similarly regenerative capacity, using ballistic sound waves to bring healing and growth to your plantar fascia. In these sessions, which only take five minutes, our team holds an applicator to your foot that radiates the ballistic waves.
After getting pulse wave therapy treatment, you can expect either immediate or gradual improvement in your pain. It usually takes 4-5 sessions to achieve maximum results.
Instead of rolling the dice and hoping your plantar fasciitis gets better, try our proven treatments for pain relief and healing. Make an appointment today with one of our podiatrists at Arizona Foot Health.
