Plantar Fasciitis & Heel Spur Treatment – Bowen Therapy
Managing Plantar Fasciitis & Heel Spurs with Bowen Therapy
Medical terms used to describe symptoms in or around the ankle and feet are: Plantar Fasciitis, Heel Spurs, Achilles Tendinitis, Arthritis and Gout
Plantar Fasciitis, that pain in your feet especially in your first few steps in the morning causing you pain in your foot, a pain that can often feel like walking on sharp glass, or a severe pain in your heel.Whereas Heel spurs are a symptom caused by Plantar Fasciitis. The Plantar Fascia is a thick band of tissue (Fascia) that runs from your Heel to your toes. When the plantar fascia is damaged or traumatized small micro tears develop on the on the heel. Your bodies natural response to these micro tears is to develop calcium deposits on the heel (Heel Spur). These small calcium deposits (Heel Spur) can accumulate and if left untreated the fatty deposits on the heel can become damaged and erode causing further complications.
Coincidentally Heel Spurs may not be the cause of the pain, recent studies suggest only 5% of those with heel spurs suffer from foot pain. The good news is that because the pain is caused by the fascia and not the spur we can treat the pain without removing the spur.
If you don’t treat plantar fasciitis, it can become a chronic condition, preventing you from being able to keep up your level of activity, and increasing the possibly developing symptoms of foot, knee, hip and back due to plantar fasciitis altering the way you walk.
The sequence of pain is tough to break. You may be caught in this cycle of anti inflammatory, muscle relaxants and painkillers. Bowen Therapy is a non-intrusive therapy where you may notice immediate reactions to the light rolling moves applied to very specific areas of your body. A typical session lasts from 30 minutes to one hour, with your Bowen Therapist using gentle rolling motions on very specific muscles, tendons and ligaments.
Some patients feel immediate tension release and/or decrease in pain. Others can feel a shift in the tension to another part of the body as the body is realigning itself and attending to underlying imbalances.
Try the Bowen Technique and feel the effects for yourself
Bowen Therapy is non manipulative hands-on therapy working over very precise tendons, ligaments, muscles, and nerves, differing from other better know pain management therapies due to the speed it works, gentleness and minimal intervention. Bowen therapy is NOT a massage!
Originating from Australia, Bowen Therapy is the ’new kid on the block’ having only been taught since the late 1980’s after Tom Bowen’s death, however, it is now hailed the most exciting modality in the world.
There is a common misconception that our skeleton influences our alignment, and the only way to straighten the misalignment is by addressing the structural issues. This is not the case. Imagine your skeleton like a suspension bridge, say Penang bridge structure, and your muscles and soft tissue the suspension ropes. Everything is in harmony as long as the suspension ropes are held in perfect tension with each other. If one or more of these ropes (your muscles and soft tissue) were to be tightened then the structure (your skeleton) would be affected, resulting in aches, pains and even non-muscular symptom related health conditions elsewhere in the body, not only in the location of heightened tension.
A Bowen Therapists goal is to find the problematic tissue, and encourage it to go back to its original state by using a very gentle stimulus, and pauses to allow time to observe if the tissue was tight, or was being tightened (pulled) from an area of tension elsewhere. These problematic areas are often found to be further away from the symptom. For example, many suffer from back pain and even plantar fasciitis (pains on the soles of feet) due to teeth grinding in their sleep. This prolonged grinding (pulling on the suspension ropes), effects the way their jaw bone lies (the structure). With all this in mind, do not be surprised when you visit us with say knee problems when your therapist becomes very interested in your back or neck.