Clinical Resource: Flat Foot Disease

So flat feet has got a lot of different names  in the literature but just everyone knows that it’s a flat foot. What that really means is  that the arch has collapsed and as the arch is collapsing your heel slides out to the  side as well so it leaves the difficulties with patients being able to go up on their  toes or climb hills or things like that and eventually can get bad enough or they have  trouble with shoe wearing or even standing. So flat foot disease is actually one that has a lot  of good non-operative treatments. There are a lot of different orthotics that we can prescribe and  varying levels and constraint to help control the foot and ankle and how it moves and how it’s  positioned when patients walk but once it gets to a disease point we’re not going to be able  to control that we need to talk about various

surgical options. So surgery for flat foot is  really wide and there’s a lot we can do for it. A lot of times it really depends on where we  catch the patient and where we catch the flat foot and its disease progression. Sometimes as  simple as going in and opening of cleaning up

the major tendon that’s causing the problem, to  something advanced as really totally correcting the deformity of the foot and fusing a couple of  the joints in place so they have a arch again and have a plan of grade foot that can be pain-free.  It’s a lot that we can do but it really depends on where they are. Flat foot surgery recovery  is usually slower than most. The reason I say that is because we’re trying to really reshape  your foot into the way it’s supposed to be so to get it right we have to do a little bit more  than a lot of other things. We can do but a lot of times we have patients back walking  comfortably within 3 months easily.