Plantar Fasciitis

[OakLeaf]

Here's what Danny Dreyer, founder of Chi Running, has to say about PF. Not much that hasn't already been said in this thread, but he pulls it all together in a way that makes it easy to understand.

Also ... since I'm getting acupuncture for my spinal and thoracic outlet injuries ... and as I mentioned my usual attitude toward healing pain is "please sir, may I have some more" ... but I hadn't mentioned PF to my DOM since the thought of acupuncture needles in my PF was just too painful to contemplate. (For those who haven't had acupuncture, mostly you don't even feel them going in, unless you feel the surrounding tissues respond in a non-painful way, but hands, wrists, ankles and feet - where the soft tissue is thin and there are a lot of nerve endings - can be sensitive.)

Well, I bothered to google, and it turns out that the typical acupuncture points for PF aren't in the PF at all, but in the calves and more general systems points. So I AM going to ask him to treat it on my next appointment. Lots of results on google for acupuncture for PF, too.


Apropos of not much, but very interesting, I asked my DOM why he thought so many acupuncture doctors are ex-engineers. (LOTS of them, including both of mine.) His speculation was that "engineers are systems oriented," which I thought was a very insightful answer. Unlike the reductionist approach taken in so much of north/western medicine, engineers understand that you can't tear down a part of something to rebuild another part of it, without having the whole structure fall apart ... you have to repair the whole bridge, so to speak.