Chiropody (Foot Care)

Chiropody Overview

Chiropody or the Foot-Care is the healthcare area that is responsible for the assessment, designing, manufacturing, fitting and modifying the foot appliances and footwear for the purposes of minimizing and alleviating the painful or debilitating health conditions of your feet.

The goal of the First Choice Foot & Health Care clinic is to help patients achieve an improved posture and optimal body alignment with the use of a custom orthotic insert and shoes. By doing so, the specialist will prevent and, most importantly, will reduce the painful and uncomfortable conditions of the foot, leg or ankle.

In brief, our clinic will analyze the patients’ pain condition or pathology and will provide recommendations for an optimal and effective treatment plan, which may include the designing and/or creating therapeutic shoes, foot orthoses, inserts, custom shoes, ankle-foot orthotics, fillers for partial foot amputations and others.

Chiropody Processes

In order to formulate the prescription that will address the patient’s foot complaint, and produce a correct custom made foot orthotic, a number of steps are involved.

Step 1: Patient’s Medical History

The first step in the process of producing a custom made foot orthotic includes a history case assessment of patient’s injury, pain or discomfort as well as the acknowledgement of other health conditions of the patient.
The goal is to understand not only the nature of the discomfort but also the circumstances in which you experience the most discomfort (i.e., when running, when wearing particular footwear).

Step 2: Bio-mechanical Examination

The bio-mechanical examination has the goal to examine your feet and lower extremities while you either are standing or lying on the examination table and ultimately identify any bone misalignment.

Step 3: Gait (the manner of walking) Analysis

After the bio-mechanical examination is done, the complete gait analysis is required. The patient will be asked to stand as well as walk, allowing chiropodist to examine overall body alignment. The gait analysis may conclude if you have one leg shorter than the other or if you have one foot that is flatter compared to the other foot.

Step 4: Semi or Non Weightbearing Casting

The semi-weight bearing cast will be taken while the patient is in a sitting position with the foot in contact with the floor. Semi weight bearing casts are often captured with a foam box.

Step 5: Prescription Writing

Each of the previous steps creates many pieces of information and factors to consider. All these factors are taken into account to come up with the prescription of the custom foot orthotic. Moreover, the patient’s weight and his/her occupational demands play an important role in the final prescription decision.

Step 6: Fabrication

The prescription and the cast are sent to an orthotic lab for custom foot orthotic fabrication. The entire process, from evaluation and casting to dispensing, can take up to 2 weeks.

 Wearing the finalized orthotics

The patients will start wearing the orthotics and during the first two to four weeks the entire body adjusts to the new orthotics and comfort gradually increases. Alternatively, some patients take only a few days to adjust.

In some instances custom foot orthotic modifications may be required. However, this is usually not recommended until you have worn your orthotics for at least four weeks (the adjustment period).