Healthy Feet, Healthy Body: Why Foot Care is Essential for Overall Wellness, Especially with Diabetes and Neuropathy

Healthy feet are crucial for a healthy body. Your feet are the foundation for a healthy body. They help provide feedback for balance, mobility, and body posture. Your feet are complex, each foot has 26 bones, 33 joints, and a sophisticated network of nerves and blood vessels as well as over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments. This complex network works to provide your body with information on your body’s stability and balance as you move through your day.  If you’re like most people, you don’t spend much time thinking about your feet except for those times when you have a problem with them.  Paying attention to the health of your feet becomes very important when you have diabetes and critically important when you have neuropathy in your feet, where you’ve lost sensation.

Since feet are complex, problems with feet can be minor and annoying or devastating and complicated. As with many aspects of life, it’s much better to be proactive and prevent problems as well as quickly identify and take care of any concerns or changes.  One of the simple, proactive things that you can do every day is check the health of your feet. If you find that it’s challenging to bend over or bring your feet up so that you can see them well, you can use a mirror that’s been placed on the floor or in a position that makes it easy to see each foot. You can also ask a friend, roommate, partner, or relative to help you with this.

Once you can view your feet well or have someone to help you will want to inspect the tops and the bottoms of each foot. You will also want to check your toes and toenails. You will want to take note of any concerning changes or developments and report those to your primary care provider. These include:

• Blisters, especially any blister with blood
• Fissuring or cracks in the skin of the foot or toe
• Redness
• Swelling
• Callusing, especially with bleeding
• Foot wounds that are not healing
• Bruising without injury

Carson Valley Health providers are accepting new patients at all five Primary Care offices, and Wound Care accepts new patients with a provider referral. Call 775.782.1550 to make an appointment.