Understanding Plantar Fasciitis

We need better research.

Take a break, to let your subconscious continue it’s research work in the background. Great vacation, thanks to many friends. Photo by FitOldDog.

Here’s our survey link, to capture badly needed data!

Understanding plantar fasciitis, and fixing it reliably (and inexpensively),

is one of my interests, right now.

Click image for link to the Interactive Map.

Understanding plantar fasciitis is not my primary business goal, however.

I just can’t resist the challenge.

History Of Understanding Plantar Fasciitis

(a) We examined every treatment we could find, and built an interactive map (linked to adjacent image).

This map took many hours of work, but it taught us a great deal.

Research takes time, effort, some money (in my case, savings), along with some patience, and inclusion of both conscious and subconscious insights.

This is very much business training for FitOldDog, using a tool I understand, based on 40 years of experience, biological research.

If you want to contribute to understanding plantar fasciitis, for everyone, just click the button, below – your call, and no obligation, though it would help us to get the word out more effectively.

A somewhat chubby (we’ll fix that, don’t worry) FitOldDog wearing the ASTRO with his Hoka One Ones. Left image, weighted leg. Right image, unweighted leg. Photo by Stacey.

This work demonstrated that:

1. Changing your shoes is generally most effective.
2. Cortisone injections or surgery, are generally less effective, and clearly more dangerous.
3. No treatment is reliably effective.
4. Some cases go on for years, in spite of these poor people trying almost everything.
5. Body movement is probably key to recovery, irrespective of the treatment chosen
6. The ASTRO guided FitOldDog towards a reliable solution for him – will this work for you? Who knows?

(c) We clearly needed more data, and data that was less ‘sample biased’. The Facebook data were gleaned from random reports of plantar fasciitis sufferers on several Facebook pages. It was time to create a survey (recommended by Kurt, of ShoeString101, thanks, Kurt).

The survey was created, based on the Facebook treatment list, in order to simplify comparison of the results.

Give your mind, body and garden a break, and they will produce. Lunch produce was waiting, beans saved the ground from drying. Photo by FitOldDog.

The initial results were published, when we had 101 completed surveys. There was a pretty good correlation, with similar conclusions.

We continued to promote the survey, using Google Adwords, Facebook and FitOldDog’s Newsletter – working to keep costs to a minimum.

We are now at 252 samples, I’m analyzing the data, and will put out a white paper within a week or so. This will be downloadable from a DropBox link.

It is good to be home.

Wishing you happy feet and happy trails.

PS

We had a wonderful vacation in Alaska, staying with friends, or camping. I continued to think about understanding plantar fasciitis, at least subconsciously. Patience is the key.

Our vacation was much enhanced by Sophie, a lovely little dog, that we transported from Fairbanks to Anchorage, for our generous friend, Maggie; in Maggie’s car – so much appreciated. Photo by Deb.

PPS

If you decide to contribute, I want you do know that I plan to record all donations (taxed!), will chip away at the money spent so far (about $8,000, half of which was due to my incompetence as a student of business, so let’s say $4,000 until I collect all my records).

When I break even, I’ll let everyone know.

Further donations will be used to continue the work, unless we see a research program out there that makes sense, and would duplicate our efforts.

Then I’ll stop, to focus on my other interests, getting people moving into old age, and saving animals from unnecessary abuse.