ACHILLES TENDON RUPTURES AND ANKLE FRACTURES
Sports injuries can include anything from blisters to fractures or breaks in the foot due to accidents. We live in a very active exercise friendly environment where people run where most people have some kind of physical activities on a frequent basis in their daily lives.
With that we see a lot of blisters that come from repetitive ambulation and working out at a vigorous level. So certainly repairing blisters and tears to the skin, injuries from abrasion bike accidents and so forth.
You can break a bone or a toe, which is a common fracture or a trauma in a foot where people sustain a break in the toe by hitting the toe against a bed post or a table leg, when walking around the house, most frequently in the dark when walking around in the night, tripping over toys in the hallway from your kids, and sustain a fracture in the toe – and sometimes it’s in the larger bones of the foot or the ankle. And so we can deal with those types of accidents and injuries to the foot and ankle and treat & repair them accordingly.
The first thing we want to do with any injury is get an x-ray to determine if there is any break in the bone structure or any of the bones in the foot or ankle.
FAQs
What are the most common sports injuries?
The most common sports injuries is probably the sprain of the ankle where the person sustains a twist, and they stretch the ligaments around the ankle joints and sometimes in the foot joints, and once these ligaments are stretched you get the inflammatory process which causes swelling around the area that is injured. So the ankle sprain is probably the most common sports injury we see.
With surfing and skateboarding where the foot is actually the stabilizer on a moving object, we see more of the foot sprain than the ankle sprain because the person isn’t jumping but the object on which they are propelling themselves on the water or going across the street on a skateboard that object will stop suddenly on the surface of the object which causes the foot to rotate and thus you get a foot sprain more so than an ankle sprain.
Whereas a person who is running and jumping, the foot will be in a titled position in the air and then when their foot hits the ground in that tilted position it causes a higher injury either in the leg or an ankle sprain or in worse cases a fracture or a break of the bone in the leg or ankle.
How do I know if my foot is sprained or fractured?
The only way to tell that is to get an x-ray because both accidents and injuries will cause swelling, pain, and bruising which is blood going into the soft tissue that surfaces and you can see it under the skin.
When you get that bruising, you can get that with a sprain as well as a break. The only way to determine whether you have a break versus a sprain in the ankle or the foot is to get an x-ray.
Can you have a broken foot and still walk on it?
Whether or not you can walk on a broken foot depends on your pain threshold.
You can have a stress fracture which seems like an annoying subtle pain initially from repetitive stress whether it be from running or standing at work and you could have a fracture. In these cases with stress fractures, people tolerate the pain because the pain is not persistent 24 hours nor is it of the same level during that time so they deal with it. So they tolerate the pain because it’s not the most severe pain they’ve had.
How long does it take to recover from a sprained foot?
It usually takes 4-6 weeks to recover from a sprained foot.
The first 3-4 weeks is usually the period where the body is responding with inflammation and swelling and you get the next month you’re recovering from the tissue is repairing itself from any damage that has been done.
So it depends on the severity and the least severe cases 4-6 weeks you’re back into your regular activity.
What is a Lisfranc injury to the foot?
That’s an injury to the joint that connects the first and second joint metatarsals and the tarsal bones around that area. If the tarsal-metatarsal joint is disruptive, that is considered a Lisfranc injury.
If the ligaments can be torn without any separation of the bone in that area and thus you have a Lisfranc (midfoot) sprain. If the tendons are just stretched, there are certain grades of that sprain.
If they’re torn, you have a third-degree sprain that will require likely repair surgically. You can have a Lisfranc sprain or a rupture of the ligament around that area and fractures of the bones, either to tarsal bones connected to the metatarsals bones themselves – and/or a dislocation of the tarsal-metatarsal joint meaning the articulation of the tarsal bones (the midfoot bones) the metatarsal bones are misplaced or out of alignment after this injury and that will require some surgical intervention to repair it. But first, we will attempt to put the displaced bones into place without surgery.
