- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- And I am Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together, we are the most famous physical therapist
on the internet.
- You better believe it. Oh, I mean, in our opinion, Bob.
- Today, happy birthday to Elvis. Yeah. 80 years old.
- Mm Hm.
- Alright, Brad, we're gonna talk about heel spurs.
- Yep. Heel spurs. And heel spurs obviously is a problem
in the heel.
- Right.
- And I think a lot of people have a kind of
a misconception of what they are, where they are
and are they the source of the problem or not.
- Right. Exactly.
- Let's talk about where they are. Can you zoom in Matt?
We're gonna come right in here. We got a, a new video master
behind the camera today. He's doing a good job.
There you go. So here you got the, the ankle, of course,
there's a skeleton here and here's the heel
or the calcaneus, it's the biggest bone in the foot
and heel spurs oftentimes come this direction,
and if you pretend like the chrome part of this pen
would be the heel spur, it would be just like that. Okay.
And they'll point up this way. And they kind of go in line
with the plantar fascia tissue oftentimes, not always,
but this is a common one, but this is where they're located.
Now, the interesting thing, okay, back up, Matt,
let's get our face in there. The interesting thing
about heel spurs is they've done studies where they x-ray
a X number of people that have no symptoms in their feet
and they have
- Heel spurs.
- Heel spurs, right Bob. And, but there's no symptoms,
so heel spurs can exist and do exist without any symptoms,
no pain. On the other hand, they can cause a lot of pain.
- Right. I think the point Brad's trying to make is
sometimes doctors will take, they'll take an x-ray
and you, you've been having heel pain and they go, oh
we see a heel spur, we found your pain,
when it may not be it at all, you have,
you've had the heel spur for years
and you didn't have any pain. So, you could maybe have
achilles tendinitis or plantar fasciitis or something else.
- Sure.
- But it's not uncommon for them to jump the gun.
- Right. Right.
- Is that fair?
- As well as the patient, sometimes the patient just thinks,
even if the doctor doesn't, you know, emphasize
that's what it is, once you hear you have a heel spur,
you think, oh my God, I got a heel spur,
what am I gonna do about it?
So we're gonna say what you can do about it at home
before you have any, any medical intervention,
some conservative treatment we call it.
- Sure.
- And the first and easiest one,
if you've been walking all day,
I'm treating a patient right now with,
she thinks she's got a heel spur problem
and she does have it on x-rays
and she simply uses a cold pack. Whoa.
- Now we're done good back.
- She just, sorry. My goodness. This works pretty good
anyways. So you put a cold pack on, you can put it
on the floor, a nice gel pack. Put your foot on there.
You know, at the end of the day, when it's sore,
that can help for pain management.
- What about the the ice pack we just made with rice?
Would that work?
- Sure. Yeah. You could use that.
- So just look back a couple videos.
- Yeah.
- Maybe I'll even put it up here.
- Yeah. Zoomer. Yeah. Put that click on there, Bob.
- Click on that one on
how to make your own ice pack out of rice.
- The other thing you can do is a cross friction massage.
- Sure.
- It may, it may or may not help, you'll know.
And you can go to our video on that too
and basically, I'm not gonna take my shoe off,
but you're gonna do that cross friction massage
on your foot, and you're gonna go over that tissue
that's irritated. And if you start doing it
and after about 30 seconds of massaging in there deep,
it starts to feel better, you're doing the right thing.
- Right. If it, you're pushing in very deep
sometimes you go one finger over the other.
- Oh yeah.
- That's true.
- Yeah, take your shoe off.
- Yeah, take it off.
- The thing is, what you're looking for is like Brad said,
if the pain just keeps getting worse and worse,
take the sock off too Brad off.
- [Brad] Bob, I got my foot powder on,
it's gonna make a mess.
- [Bob] That's alright.
- [Brad] That's why I wear it.
- [Bob] More than a mess.
- [Brad] You should, my wife really have a problem with it.
Okay.
- [Bob] Now you gotta face the camera though, Brad.
So he is, a lot of times, it's right in this section here
as on Brad.
- [Brad] Yep. Yep.
- [Bob] And he's, he's pushing very hard.
- [Brad] Yeah. I'm not doing the, across the skin.
- [Bob] Now you start this and, and the pain just keeps
getting worse and worse. It's too inflamed to do this.
Then, you should start with the ice first.
- [Brad] Right.
- After a couple days retry the, the cross fiber massage
again and what you want to do again, you're
you're not just pushing skin around,
you're getting real deep, really pushing hard here.
And you can do that for, for five minutes.
You can go cross fiber like that.
- Usually, your fingers get tired of doing.
- Yeah. Before that, before, you know, you know,
you could stop.
- Right.
- The, and what you're doing is you're
breaking up the scar tissue that has often developed there
and just often, you can give dramatic relief.
- Sure.
- So.
- Right, right. And then, you know,
those are things you can do on your own.
You could try some inserts.
I wouldn't spend a lot of money on 'em,
just get some $10 or $15 ones and see if some cushion
in there helps.
- See if you can get some relief,
don't don't have the custom made ones made.
I want, not initially, I would just try some ones
off the shelf and see if you have some relief.
- You better believe it.
- And then other things that you can do,
you're pretty much gonna have to go see a therapist
probably if they wanna do phono freezes, other freezes,
that's a little more advanced
and we're not gonna get into that right now.
- And you had mentioned another way to do ice,
Brad, is you can actually take a frozen bottle of water.
- Right, if you take a plastic, like a 20 ounce pot bottle,
or water bottles about 20 ounces, obviously
if it's soda, get rid of the soda, fill it up,
not to the top, about 80% full freeze it,
put it on the floor, and then we have a video on that too.
- Yeah.
- Roll back and forth over that.
It gives a little bit of massage
plus the cooling effect from the cold.
- Yeah.
- And if you're 40 years old and odor, older,
you are the people that want to subscribe to us
because we're gonna give you more information,
more tips on how to keep your body healthy at home
without going to the doctor with little simple tips
like this, what do you say about that?
- We're, we're genius.
- We, well, we are pretty genius. And if we think about it,
we could think of more reasons why we're genius, right?
- Yeah.
- And we gotta actually--
- He agrees.
- And we got a skeleton with a leg that's--
- Amputations.
- Chewing on his finger.
- Alright, thanks a lot.