We don’t normally go around telling everyone how good our feet feel, unless we have recently found relief from foot pain. Everyone who has suffered (or is now suffering) from foot or ankle pain knows it’s not easy to ignore.

People with foot and ankle pain endure different symptoms. The intensity of these symptoms can range from mild to severe, and can include numbness, tingling, burning, aching, cramping, sharp or dull pain, a pins-and-needles sensation, or a tight band-like feeling. Maybe your feet feel heavy, or you feel like there might be broken bones in your feet. Your feet might feel painfully swollen inside although you don’t see any visible swelling.

As a former foot pain sufferer, I had often described my own painful feet feeling “like someone beat on them with a pool stick.” Due to a misalignment of the bones in my feet and ankles, sometimes my right foot would roll outward (invert) on un-even ground. The good news is that chiropractic turned my life around, including my foot and ankle pain.

What can cause misalignments or injuries to your feet? It could be something as little as walking on uneven ground. Jumping out of the bed of a pickup truck, stepping off a curb, jumping across a ditch, kicking a ball, lifting something heavy with your foot (or having something heavy fall on your foot)—all of these can cause damage.

The bad news is that whatever can cause minor misalignment in the joints of the feet can pull on the surrounding soft tissues, leading to abnormal stress on that joint and starting a sequence of events leading to wear and tear and pain in those joints. You can end up with the following injuries and conditions: subluxations, fasciitis, tendonitis, bursitis, arthritis, neuritis, bunions, ligament laxity and loss of the arch.

Consider for a moment what your feet endure daily. Your stride when walking puts the whole weight of your body on the heel first, then the ball with each step—one foot at a time. Toes are so delicate and small by comparison, yet at one point in our stride, the weight of our entire body can briefly be on a few toes. No wonder our feet hurt!

You have 28 bones in the area of each foot and ankle, which is more than 25 percent of the bones in your entire body. Each one of these bones can go out of alignment and cause pain.

Your specialists, physical therapists or massage therapists may not have explained this to you.

Because of my own terrible experiences with pain, finding misalignments and correcting them has become my personal crusade. Nearly two decades of clinical experience in the science and art of chiropractic care has armed me with the knowledge, experience and skills to bring the good news of chiropractic relief to pain sufferers.