Each of your feet contains 26 small bones. These bones are under more pressure than most of the other bones in your body. While these bones may be small, they’re quite strong because they, quite literally, carry you through life.
However, if you pile on to their already heavy workload, problems can arise, such as stress fractures. To give you an idea about how common this is, stress fractures in the foot or ankle account for about 20% of sports injuries in recreational and competitive athletes.
Our team at Neuhaus Foot and Ankle specializes in sports injuries that involve the feet and ankles, and we can say that our experiences reflect that stat above. In fact, a considerable portion of sports injuries are stress fractures. However, these stress injuries are not only relegated to the playing field, as we see many non-athletic patients with stress fractures.
No matter how the injury develops, early intervention is critical because stress fractures become bigger problems quickly. With that in mind, we review a few common signs of stress fractures below.
The first and most obvious sign of a stress fracture is pain when you’re standing on the affected foot. This pain worsens the more you move around.
Often, stress fractures start out as bone bruises. If you don’t give this bruise time and space to heal, it can turn into a full-blown fracture in the bone. At this point, that intermittent pain can become more constant and even keep you up at night.
If you’re feeling the type of pain we describe above, feel around your foot to see if there’s a tender spot. Stress fractures can lead to general foot and ankle pain. However, many people also have extremely tender spots that likely indicate where the root problem lies.
While swelling can certainly develop in response to a stress fracture, don’t assume that your foot or ankle is fine if there's no swelling. Many people with stress fractures don’t have any swelling.
As we’ve already mentioned, stress fractures can get progressively worse if you ignore the problem, so we strongly suggest that you come to see us at the first signs of trouble.
At your appointment, we first review your symptoms. Then, we turn to X-ray to get a better idea of what’s going on inside your foot. In most cases, we can spot a stress fracture through X-ray. However, some of these injuries are small, and we might need to increase our imaging efforts with an MRI.
If imaging confirms our diagnosis of a stress fracture, our goal is to treat it as conservatively as possible with:
If the stress fracture is large and can benefit from repair, we might recommend surgery, but this is rare.
The most important thing is to get off your foot and to get help as soon as you realize there’s an issue. To get started, please contact one of our 18 locations in Tennessee to schedule an appointment with one of our experienced foot specialists.
