New treatment for plantar fasciitis (heel pain)

When your first few steps out of bed in the morning cause severe pain in the heel of your foot, you may have plantar fasciitis .. an overuse injury affecting the sole of the foot. A diagnosis of plantar fasciitis means you have inflamed the tough, fibrous band of tissue (fascia) connecting your heel bone to the base of your toes.

If you don't treat plantar fasciitis, it may become a chronic condition. You may not be able to keep up your level of activity and you may also develop symptoms of foot, knee, hip and back problems because of the way plantar fasciitis changes the way you walk.

clipped from muzich.blogspot.com A new technique has been found to be 95 percent effective in easing the pain of plantar fasciitis injected 44 plantar fasciitis patients with a small amount of anesthesia. The anesthetic needle was used to repeatedly puncture the site where the patient felt pain. This technique creates a small amount of local bleeding that spurs healing of the fascia and is known as dry needling. Lastly, using ultrasound guidance to avoid a rupture, steroids were injected around the fascia to help eliminate inflammation. After the 15-minute, one-time outpatient procedure, symptoms disappeared within three weeks for 42 of the study's 44 patients. "In cases of mild plantar fasciitis , patients should first try noninvasive solutions before any other treatments," Sconfienza said in a statement. "But when pain becomes annoying and affects the activities of daily living, dry-needling with steroid injection is a viable option." Exercises