Pain Relieving Pads
Metatarsalgia is the medical term for the condition where you experience pain at the ball of your foot.
People with this condition often feel pain and inflammation in the area directly below their toes. The plantar plate receives the most pressure when we stand, walk, or run.
Symptoms
- A sharp, aching, burning pain in the ball of your foot. The area just behind your toes on the sole of your foot.
- The pain worsens when you stand or try to move around, especially when you do it barefoot on a hard surface.
- Sharp pain that shoots through your toes. Numbness or a tingling sensation in your toes.
- Feeling like you have a pebble in your shoe.
The main symptom of Metatarsalgia is feeling pain at the end of one or more metatarsal bones in the ball of your foot. The pain will come across a period of many months.
Metatarsalgia
Causes
Metatarsalgia can be caused by one single factor or a combination of varying factors, which include:
- Participating in intense training activities that involve lots of running or jumping. This cause can be heightened when the participant’s shoes are ill-fitting or worn.
- Specific foot shapes such as people with a high arch are more prone to developing this condition since the arch puts extra pressure on the plantar plate in the ball of the foot.
- Foot deformities caused by wearing small shoes or high heels could also cause your foot to become misshapen, creating hammertoes and bunions. These conditions may lead to metatarsalgia.
- Being overweight could also lead to metatarsalgia. Your body transfers all of its weight to the metatarsals at the ball of your foot.
- Wearing high heels or shoes with a narrow toe box could also cause this condition. Shoes that lack padding also contributes to this condition.
- Stress fractures inflicted on the metatarsals could affect the way you put weight on your foot. The extra pressure placed on one side of the foot could cause Metatarsalgia.
- Morton’s neuroma is a non-cancerous fibrous growth that grows around the nerves between the third and fourth metatarsal heads. The growth causes symptoms that are similar to metatarsalgia and could contribute to stress in the metatarsal.
When should you make an appointment?
If you have a burning feeling or outright pain in the ball of your foot that doesn’t go away even after switching your activities or changing your shoes, you’ll need to make an appointment with the best foot and ankle doctors.
Diagnosis
Since many other conditions often express symptoms similar to metatarsalgia, your doctor will examine your foot while you stand and when you sit. They will then discuss your lifestyle and activity level and take an X-Ray to rule out any other foot problems that may be causing the condition.
Treatment
Most common treatments for this condition are quite conservative, mostly if the condition hasn’t gone too far. Your doctor will recommend that you rest your leg, get better-fitting shoes with padding, and use metatarsal pain-relieving pads.
Frederick Foot and Ankle pain-relieving pads
Frederick Foot and Ankle is the best choice near your for diagnosing and treating foot and ankle problems. Our staff is dedicated to providing the best services for our patients when administering care to ensure that they have a great healing process with a swift recovery.
Our establishment has a wide selection of footpads like metatarsal pain-relieving pads and hammertoe regulators that help patients alleviate foot pain. The footpad is worn directly on your skin and is filled with a gel that helps redistribute the pressure placed on the ball of your foot more evenly, which helps reduce Metatarsalgia’s painful symptoms. The pain-relieving pad is washable and reusable.
If you’ve experienced some or all the symptoms indicated above, then it would be great if you made an appointment with us to get a diagnosis and treatment for your condition.