Preventing Heel/Plantar Fasciitis problems

Kurt Godel wrote: »

Hi Raighne,

I can't think of a single way this forum would benefit more when it comes to common running injuries than links to your website/blog. I benefited hugely through your (linked) 2008 post, and I think that's very good generic advice.

If you've changed tack since then, of course I'd defer to your expertise. What I would say, is that your original advice worked well for me, the Admins of the site have agreed that the "no medical advice rule" does not apply to "what worked for me" generic running injury advice; and in any case generic running injury advice is helpful for the community at larger here. I appreciate Mod warnings and caveats may be well-intentioned or even considered necessary, but as it stands there has been Admin permission to discuss common running injuries, and that is a useful thing.

The solutions I originally used obviously had positive benefits for me back then, which is why I chose to write about them, so it would be harsh for me to say that they "don't work".

Essentially, were I have changed tack is that they did not provide a lasting solution for me. The reason I only came to understand when Tony Riddle introduced me to the emerging field of Darwinian Medicine which provides a complementary scientific approach to the mechanistic explanations that currently dominate medical science and the professions of GP and physiotherapy (this is not intended as an indictment of any kind on those professions btw, science is a moving scale and while this new thinking is bound to transform medical science over the coming decades, the treatment of proximate causes still play an important part in treatment - if you get smashed up on the motorway, break your leg, get bitten by a snake or suffer a violent viral infection, treatment of the proximate cause is absolutely necessary as the first recourse. You then worry about the evolutionary cause later!).

To borrow the quote from Wikipedia this is the difference:

"all biological traits need two kinds of explanation, both proximate and evolutionary. The proximate explanation for a disease describes what is wrong in the bodily mechanism of individuals affected by it. An evolutionary explanation is completely different. Instead of explaining why people are different, it explains why we are all the same in ways that leave us vulnerable to disease. Why do we all have wisdom teeth, an appendix, and cells that can divide out of control?"

So when you take an evolutionary view on injury prevention in sports, you do not treat proximate causes and all the treatment in my original blog post fall under that category. You go straight for the evolutionary cause instead, understand it and rectify it. Both can work, but only one can offer a permanent solution.

Take the example: we are vulnerable to myopia because this gene is only a problem for people who spend inordinate amounts of their childhood looking at objects very close (such as in reading). Thus the evolutionary treatment for myopia is to identify the people with the gene and ensure they do not get exposed to too much reading early in their lives.

Running injuries, except for trauma, follow a similar pathology once you look at them from an evolutionary perspective and ask questions such as: "Why does inflammation occur", "why is there muscle imbalances" and "why do we pronate". Generally, it comes down to one thing: exposure to novel situations and environments which either trigger an over-reaction from our defense mechanisms, compromise our natural movement patterns or exposes flaws in our machinery that were irrelevant in a natural environment but become a liability in an unnatural one.