Doc On The Run Podcast

This morning, I was on a second opinion call with a runner who had a couple of different injuries in his foot. 

The main problem keeping him from running was an injury to the collateral ligaments in one of his toes.

"The toe feels weak and unstable." He is understandably worried that the instability is going to cause a problem if he runs.

He was asking me:

“Well, can we surgically repair the ligaments?”

Should I have surgery to rep...

This morning, I had a conversation with a runner who had an injury. He has been getting a lot better and one of the things that really seemed to help the injury improve was wearing compression socks. 

His question was a really good one. He said:

“I had so much improvement with wearing compression socks, but with the injury I have, every time I take the socks off and on, it feels like I am moving the injured tissue now.  I am not re...

If you get an overtraining injury like a metatarsal stress fracture or a plantar plate sprain or Achilles tendonitis, or peroneal tendonitis, a doctor might prescribe a fracture walking boot. 

Well, it is designed to hold you still so that you can hopefully walk on something like a fracture and still let it heal.   The reason for this episode is this morning I was on a call with someone who has been wearing a boot and he is curio...

I was doing a second opinion webcam consultation with a runner who noticed a lump in the calf muscle.    The knot in the leg wasn't limiting his running. In fact, when he was running, this lump in the calf muscle felt better, not worse. 

So, you have to wonder, could the knot "not" be a big deal? 

There are really 3 things a runner can do immediately after noticing a bump in the leg.   Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast, we're...

Today I am about to drive to the airport, get on a plane, fly to Wisconsin to give five lectures on running injuries at a medical conference.

As I was finalizing that talk on medical imaging strategies for athletes, I was thinking about a conversation that I had yesterday with an athlete who had a very frustrating course and actually called me for a second opinion. 

He had an injury that hass been going on for a long time. In short...

I know. You don't want plantar plate surgery. 

But if your plantar plate ligament doesn't repair itself, or your doctor doesn't help it repair itself, you might get talked into surgery. 

If you have plantar plate repair surgery, you may spend a lot less time running over the weeks following surgery...because you have to let it heal. 

There are really three mistakes that I see runners make when they've had a plantar plate injury. Th...

This episode comes from a question posted by one of the Doc On The Run YouTube viewers as a comment on the video “Where to run with plantar fasciitis.”

In the video, I was trying to explain which surfaces can help you the most when you're trying to run with plantar fasciitis. The only way to do that is to make sure you are decreasing the stress and strain on the plantar fascia ligament. 

But the question was...

Is the plantar fasci...

There are three ways that a doctor might convince you that it's really time to have surgery and fix that plantar plate ligament that's been making you miserable when you've been trying to run. 

To you, it may not seem that bad. It kind of aches. It kind of swells. It kind of bugs you. But then the doctor suddenly says, “Look, it's not getting better, let's have surgery.” 

Well, how does the doctor convince you that it's time for su...

I'm not going to tell you that any runner should want to use crutches. I'm also not going to tell you that you will enjoy wearing a fracture walking boot.

But there are reasons that you may want to do things a little differently if you're a runner. 

The critical issue is that runners must really try to speed up the healing process as much as possible, so that you can avoid losing your running fitness. 

What are the three time-sensi...

Most of the runners I see who have pain in the ball of the foot from a plantar plate sprain rarely start out with a completely torn plantar plate tear. 

More often, runners ignore the pain from the plantar plate sprain and it evolves into a full thickness plantar plate tear. 

Surgery is only needed when the plantar plate is torn in such a way that the plantar plate ligament cannot be expected to heal without surgery. 

But there are...

Sometimes when you get injured and have to stop running, you start to lose your identity.

One of the things that I notice most in runners who have gone weeks or months without running, is they are really bummed out. 

These runners seem really grumpy. In some cases, they don't even view themselves as a "runner" anymore...well, because they're "not running."

If you want to heal and get back to running as quickly as possible this can ...

I just had a consultation with a runner who had foot pain that she thought might be a stress fracture that had been coming and going for about a month. 

She had been increasing her training volume and doing strength exercises that are supposed to build her running fitness. 

The pain seemed to be volume related. The more training she did, the more she would notice the discomfort in her foot.

But when we x-rays of her foot, the radio...

Just this morning, during the live Stress Fracture Masterclass I had an interesting question. 

The story went like this. An athlete who is a State ranked high school cross country and track, had to suddenly stop running due to intense pain that started about 15 days ago.

He went and saw a doctor. He got x-rays. He got an MRI, had a physical exam where the orthopedic doctor poked around and tried to figure out what was going on. The...

Let's say you had an ankle injury a long time ago. 

You sprained the ankle when you were out on a trail run, it got better , and you went right back to running.

But over time, you slowly got more and more pain in the ankle. 

In that case, you doctor might order an MRI of your ankle, or a similar imaging study called an MRA (instead of MRI). 

What's the difference between MRI or MRA in a runner with an old nagging ankle injury?

That...

I recently saw a runner who thought that he might have a tibial stress fracture. But it turns out, it was just shin splints, which of course is good news. Because you don't really want a tibial stress fracture. Shin splints is much easier to treat. 

One of the questions he asked me was about the best running shoes based on his foot type. 

This runner really needed more stability than got from the running shoes that he was wearing.

...

If you got pain on the ball of the foot, at the base on the 2nd, and you have been running in a minimalist shoe,  running uphill, doing lots of calf raises, or running on steps, you could have an injury to a little bitty ligament called the plantar plate ligament. 

If you get an injury to the plantar plate, sometimes your second toe will drift toward your big toe or away from your big toe. The toe drifting sideways can happen for t...

If you roll your ankle on a trail run and it turns black and blue and swollen, you may think you just have to take a few days off. 

In fact, if you research how long it will take to get back to running, you might find a study that says that if you do early range of motion after an ankle sprain, it only takes 4 days to get back to pre-injury levels of activity. 

However, if you do that, you can wind up with a lot of trouble later.  

Last night, I was doing a consultation with an athlete who had a fracture when she accidentally kicked a piece of furniture. 

Her foot was swollen, it was black and blue. The foot was really painful and she couldn’t walk on it. 

She went to urgent care and they took x-rays. She was a little concerned that they told her that it wasn't broken. So, she called me for a second opinion.

My doctor missed a fracture on my x-rays. What shou...