About one quarter of our bones are in our feet. How can you keep them strong and pain free for longer?
D
entists have trained us well to visit them on a regular basis for a check-up, rather than waiting until things start to hurt. Hylton Menz, a professor of podiatry at La Trobe University in Melbourne, wishes we’d do the same for our feet.
“We probably ignore our feet relative to other parts of our body, because we stick them in shoes and they’re a long way away, so we tend to forget about feet,” he says. “It’s only really when they don’t actually function properly – so when they become painful, they don’t do what we want them to do – that we really think about them.”
About one quarter of all the bones in our body are in our feet, connected by 33 joints and more than 100 tendons and ligaments. Our feet are marvels of engineering, but we tend to treat them like a neglected cart horse. Experts tell us how we can give the foot some much-needed care.







