One could be forgiven for finding confusion that results from heel pain. Stress fracture? Arthritis? Tendinitis? Achilles tendon issues? Bursitis? Maybe. A common cause of heel pain is plantar fasciitis.
Plantar: relating to the sole of the foot. Fasciitis: inflammation of the fascia, the thin, fibrous tissue that surrounds muscles or other organs. The “itis” means it is inflamed.
Plantar fasciitis is a painful experience. Every step. Standing too long. Those first steps when you get up from sitting or get out of bed in the morning. When I was suffering from it, I was seriously contemplating what my life would be like when I could no longer walk. That’s how bad the pain was.
I tried the Banerji protocol for Plantar fasciitis: Symphytum 200c mixed with Rhus tox 30c, taken twice daily until better.
I took it twice daily for a long time. It wasn’t getting better.
Then, I had an x-ray done. Aha! I had heel spurs. The internet will tell you that heel spurs are not (necessarily) what causes the pain, it’s the plantar fasciitis that causes the pain. They figured this out because once upon a time they used to do surgery to remove the bone spur, but I guess that didn’t fix the pain so they decided that heel spurs aren’t painful.
I disagree. Why do I disagree? Because when I took the remedy for bone spurs, Hekla lava 200c, my pain lessened by 80% within about a week. After many, many weeks of taking the plantar fasciitis remedy and getting nothing, and then trying a few other remedies to no avail — this was amazing progress.
Could it have been that the Symphytum/Rhus tox combination finally kicked in and did what it was supposed to do? Maybe. Or, it could be a causal relationship between the two conditions. It could be that the plantar fasciitis causes the bone spurs or it could be that the bone spurs some how causes the plantar fasciitis. Heel spurs (aka plantar calcaneal spurs) are present in 45%-85% of those with plantar fasciitis (Kirkpatrick, Yassaie and Mirjalili, 2017). I don't think they have figured all this out yet.
When you look at the remedy Hekla lava and how it was discovered, I’m going to give it the credit for reducing my pain.
Hekla (sometimes spelled Hecla) lava is named after the Hekla volcano in Iceland. In the 1800s, a London physician noticed that the sheep grazing a short distance from the volcano had bone deformities (exostosis) of the jaws. They surmised that the finer ash from the volcano was actually the culprit. So, like cures like. The ash of the Hekla volcano causes exostosis of the jaws. (Exostosis: benign outgrowth of cartilaginous (made of cartilage) tissue on a bone.) The potentized (the dilution process used to make homeopathic remedies) Hekla lava can assist in removing the exostoses.
I have not had a follow up x-ray to see if the heel spurs are gone. I don’t care, because the pain is gone. But, this story is a good indication of how conventional medicine and homeopathy can work nicely together. According to the Internet, the main answers to these painful foot problems in conventional medicine are: rest, icing the foot, orthotics, physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medicines, cortisone injections and surgery. To each their own.
If you are experiencing foot or heel pain, contact me to see if homeopathy might help you.
Julia Coyte, CHom
Classically Practical homeopath
#wellnessawaits
For more information:
1. on the proving of Heckla lava
2. Kirkpatrick, Yassaie and Mirjalili, 2017: The plantar calcaneal spur: a review of anatomy, histology, etiology and key associations.
Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash