Mumbai: Every woman craves for that Cinderella hour in life when she loses her shoe at her future prince’s ballroom party only to get it back, alongwith her Prince Charming. While this is the stuff of fairy tales, more and more people are fixing their feet to fit funky footwear.
“Normally when you walk, your weight is evenly distributed over the entire sole of the foot, but when you strap on a heel, suddenly that weight bears down on the ball of the foot, which has a pad of fat working as a shock absorber between the bone and the ground. As people wear high heels, that pad gets pushed out of the way to deprive the bone of a cushion, thereby ensuing irritation. As a result, your 125mm Christian Louboutins become torture devices,” says Dr Ashutosh Chaudhari, orthopedic surgeon at Global Hospital of Mumbai.
With high-end brands like Gucci brogues, chunky-heeled Michael Kors bootees, Prada shoes, pumps and trainers, Victorian boots, Jimmy Choos, Christian Louboutins, Manolo Blahniks etc. enticing women from shop windows the moment they step out, it is not surprising that several podiatric clinics have their hands full with people requesting foot surgeries to fit into fashionable slippers, beach-compatible flip-flops, high heels, stilettoes, pointed pencils, wedge heels or funky flats. The demand for shapely feet, toes and ankles has thus shot through the roof.
“I do get calls or appointments asking to conduct different types of surgeries, sometimes even unreasonable bordering on the bizarre, yet I can assure you that the success rate of such customised surgeries is dismal,” discloses the doctor.
Noticing the increase in knee-replacements among 40-plus women, the surgeon also talks about knee-stress complaints seen among his patients due to the compulsive impact of wearing varied shoes.
“Researchers have evaluated that the stress on the knee is far greater while walking in specialised shoes rather than barefoot, which means knee stress is the least when flat sandals are worn to mimic a barefoot gait. However, knee strain invariably increases with high heels,” he adds.
A slew of cost-effective surgeries ranging from bunionectomy, aesthetic toe-shortening, toe-lengthening, foot tuck and toe-liposuction, to reconstructive surgeries like bunionplasty are popular these days. “The fact is, when a podiatrist suggests a surgery, it typically indicates involvement of breaking and resetting the bone with a screw(s). Such a delicate patchwork involves six to eight weeks of recovery. Reconstructive surgeries of the foot are done more for aesthesis than for any other purpose,” he shares.
Thanks to our fast-paced lifestyle, certain deformities like high heel foot, hitchhiker’s toe, hammertoes, toebesity can surface. “There’s no ideal treatment of a high heel foot and it can be left alone. A hitchhiker’s toe can be attended with a Botox treatment, while a hammer toe can initially be assuaged with soft footwear only to be rectified by a congenial surgery later,” he states.
“Undoubtedly, killer heels are the ultimate accessory in power dressing and modern-day women wear them to appear more confident, stylish and attractive in taut business suits,” he says, adding,
“However, higher the heel goes, the more it tilts the body forward and more one needs to lean back. This can in turn also push your pelvis out of alignment and cause an unwanted compression of the spine. Such shoes inevitably make you walk on the balls of your feet, which can again arouse severe aches and pains, and finally result in stress fractures. Besides, they lead to increased wear and tear in the joints and soft tissues which by and large lead to arthritis. Also, some women can get trapped nerves that even require surgery.”
Talking about therapies and injections, Dr Chaudhari touches upon some cases to point like a platelet-rich plasma therapy, stem-cell injections, injectable fillers for metatarsal cushioning, toe-liposuction, Botox, Dysport, Myobloc and so on. “Let me tell you at the very outset that I have neither administered these injections personally nor performed such surgeries, since the risk-reward ratio over here is an absolute zero,” he says.
