EARLY PROBLEMS on Feet
About 99 percent of us are born with perfect feet and manage
to quickly acquire trouble. One study carried out not long ago in seven cities
found that 74 percent of children in elementary schools had foot problems; by
high school, 88 percent.
There are several reasons for this. Throughout life the feet
are subjected to the stress of standing on hard surfaces. Man doesn't do enough
walking, which is good for the feet. Standing is an enemy of the feet in the
sense that it involves 100 percent use of them; walking involves only 50
percent use since one foot rests while the other supports weight.
And
shoes-poorly fitted and often designed for the eyes rather than the feet
-deserve a major share of the blame. Foot specialists who have examined many
thousands of feet lament over what they call "man's insistence on forcing
a square into a triangle." If you take off a shoe and look straight down
at your foot, you will note that the sides make roughly parallel straight
lines, and even the front can be described more or less as a straight line
running from big to little toe. But look at your shoes and more than likely the
toes are shaped like triangles.
Only when man started enclosing his feet in shoes did he
have to start worrying about corns, calluses, hammer toes, bunions, and other
foot ailments.
MYTHS
We are surrounded by foot myths. They range from the
notion that many foot troubles stem from wearing sneakers in childhood to wearing loafers, which are supposed to be bad
because they let the feet spread.
As one authority on the feet notes,
undoubtedly the feet will grow somewhat larger and wider if not restricted by
ill-shaped shoes, but this is healthy. The biggest misconceptions center on
flat feet and fallen arches. Because the Army once rejected thousands of men
with flat feet, the idea that there's something inevitably wrong with flat feet
persists.
One of the nation's outstanding investigators of
the foot, has reported that many people with arches "as flat as
pancakes" never have experienced foot pain, while some of the most painful
and obstinate cases involve feet with well-formed arches.
According to some authorities, only one out of 1,000 people
with flat feet experiences pain because the feet are flat. The best practice
for the flat-footed person-and anyone else with a painful foot problem for
which there is no clear-cut, obvious cause-is to get advice and treatment from
a physician or podiatrist rather than to keep buying arch supports.
