Health Choices
Our feet are such an amazing piece of kit. They get us around all our lives but we don’t really think about them until something goes wrong.
People say to me, ‘how can you see and touch people’s feet all day?’ but i love my job. Podiatry is so varied – there are so many elements involved.
i left school not knowing what i wanted to do until i met a podiatrist and got chatting. it sounded like the job for me. i went to the university of ulster to do a three-year degree before starting in private practice in 2003 and doing a masters at edinburgh’s Queen margaret university through distance/block learning. i moved to england and set up my own practice, stride clinic (strideclinic.com), in 2014 .
i deal with all sorts of issues – from bunions, ingrowing toenails and corns to gait analysis. There are great advances in treatments for things like fungal nail infections and prosthetic toenail reconstruction.
But the main issue i see these days is plantar fasciitis. it’s so common there are even Facebook pages about it! essentially, it’s a strain in the ligament in the sole of your foot, causing a knife-like pain in your arch. People spend a fortune buying off-the-shelf aids but you need to find the cause to get the right treatment.
it’s the same with bunions. lots of people have surgery to remove them but it’s important to find out why you developed them in the first place to try to prevent them recurring.
good advice for keeping feet healthy is to moisturise them morning and night. if we moisturised them as much as our faces we’d have much healthier feet. and get them looked at as soon as a problem occurs, to help prevent infection. also, give your nails a breather from polish sometimes.
The question i’m asked most is what’s the difference between a podiatrist and a chiropodist? Well, they’re the same thing! a chiropodist is what we were called before we came into line with the us.