Your foot or ankle is in pain, and you’ve decided to just grit your teeth and bear it in the hopes that the discomfort will go away on its own. Unfortunately, this approach to your all-important feet and ankles is anything but wise as you run the risk of permanently damaging your foot or ankle. For any foot or ankle injury, you need prompt diagnosis and treatment.
Providing advanced diagnostic and treatment services is the highly qualified team of podiatry experts here at Neuhaus Foot and Ankle. Whether you’ve sprained your ankle or you’re struggling with heel pain, we can quickly identify and treat the injury and put that spring back in your step.
The anatomy of your feet and ankles is incredibly complex — each of your feet contains 26 bones, 30 joints, and more than 100 soft connective tissues, such as muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Making matters more complicated, a problem in one area can often lead to symptoms in another, which is why diagnosing the underlying issue is so important.
For example, heel pain can be caused by many issues, such as plantar fasciitis or Achilles tendinitis, two tissues that are located in different areas of your feet and ankles. By zeroing in on the source of your heel pain, we can remedy the problem more easily.
To do this, each of our diagnoses typically includes:
Rest assured, we are completely thorough when it comes to properly diagnosing your foot or ankle injury.
To illustrate our point about the importance of a proper diagnosis, let’s take a look at the most common sports injury — a sprained ankle. Each day in the United States, there are thousands of these injuries, which range from mild to severe.
There are varying grades of sprained ankles, each requiring a different standard of care, which is why your most important step is to have us take a look so that we can choose the right treatment plan for you.
There are serious repercussions for ankle sprains that don’t heal properly, including post-traumatic arthritis and ankle instability.
While you may think that simply resting or immobilizing a swollen and painful ankle will do the trick, you might be surprised to learn that early physical therapy is often very important in restoring full function.
Another great example of the importance of a proper diagnosis is when you’re dealing with stress fractures in your feet. Stress fractures often lead to an intermittent ache (it increases during and after activity) that can be hard to pinpoint.
If you ignore the problem, the fracture can’t heal and may get progressively worse, requiring more involved care in the future.
If, on the other hand, you come to see us at the first signs of trouble, we use advanced imaging to determine whether you have a stress fracture and, if confirmed, we can intervene quickly to treat it.
The bottom line is that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose in having us diagnose your foot or ankle injury. Even if we don’t find anything problematic, you have peace of mind knowing that your feet and ankles are in good shape and can continue to carry you in the future.
For a prompt diagnosis of your foot or ankle injury, contact one of our locations in Hermitage, Brentwood, Nashville, Mount Juliet, Waverly, Smyrna, Gallatin, or Lebanon, Tennessee.
