Looking at a clients feet is a great way to understand the amount of musculo-skeletal dysfunction of the entire body. As the part of our body that has to negotiate the final details of walking, standing, etc, the feet will often take on a lot of pain and structural breakdown.
Due to the number of bones and joints in the feet and their relative size, the feet can take on many shapes and configurations.
As an example of this, people use the terms "flat feet" and "high arches" to describe conditions of the arches of the foot.
A traditional "structural" model (often used by many doctors, podiatrists etc) is to treat the flat feet or high arches as a part fo that persons inheritance or as a mysterious breakdown of structure. Often orthotics are used in these cases to correct the structural change, however the functional imbalance is rarely addressed or even considered.
Through our clinical observation it becomes obviously clear that the structure of the feet is shaped by the function of the whole body bearing down on them. In a nutshell, the two whole body postures of the Green Light Reflex and the Red Light Reflex position the feet tend to lead to Eversion (suppination) and Inversion (pronation) respectively.
When you add the individual mixture of possible muscular and movement misfunctions of any client, the difference in what can happen to the feet are amazing. Though structural changes do occurr, and orthotics and other devices can be helpful at certain times for certain people, the real solution is to bring the entire body and movement patterns into a healthy balance.
