Well-being And Health Begin With The Feet

Discovering the importance of the foot for our health and the simplicity of its care is discovering a part of the essential in our own life.

With so much insole and sophisticated footwear there will be those who find it strange to recommend as the best remedy to take care of the foot to regain the habit of walking barefoot even for a few minutes a day.

Footwear that can achieve the benefits of walking barefoot has not yet been discovered. Perhaps the closest footwear is some models designed like a glove with its five toes for the foot.

Your feet support you physically and mentally

The feet are in charge of restoring our physical and mental balance. Its ability to adapt to the terrain, its conditions and irregularities, sets in motion physical and mental resources that stimulate the whole body.

Keeping your balance is an art in the face of the constant attraction of gravity, it is knowing how to be in the midst of imbalances. We do this daily with more or less effort and when we are not capable of it, everything collapses. Getting up and walking, raising morale, mood, tone, is the art of regaining balance. And it all starts from the support of our feet.

To appease the imbalance with pills and medications that cancel sensations is to lose yourself in the problem. When one is fallen and sunk, consciousness should return to the feet and trust in that ability that they demonstrated to hold us upright from the first year of life.

Start by looking at how the feet rest

It is good to train awareness of the foot supports, to feel the heels well supported and the toes in contact with the ground surface and well separated from each other. We can help ourselves with our hands by stretching the fingers, opening the entire sole of the foot wide and letting the entire surface or as much as possible rest on the ground, as if the foot were widening.

If there are support problems, before thinking about prostheses and insoles, we should think about rehabilitating the foot, about recovering its adaptability, which is great if it is stimulated rather than prevented with a prosthetic shoe.

The supports of the foot will influence the way you walk. Its alignment with the knees and hips will affect the entire spine, on the muscles and posture tone, and also on psychological aspects.

To perceive and work the foot supports you can do the following exercise:

1. Swing. With a straight head and a horizontal gaze, a back and forth rocking is caused, and the weight is alternately felt on the fingertips and on the heel. Then a lateral imbalance is caused with the pelvis and the head, and the supports on the foot are felt to change.
2. Move your pelvis. The pelvis is tilted back and forth, laterally and with rotations, noticing the subtle changes in the support of the feet.
3. Shoulders and head. It causes movements of the shoulders and head and changes in the supports on the feet are noticed.
4. Different movements. Exercises can also be performed so that all the joints of the foot and fingers gain strength and flexibility: stepping on a ball and feeling the sensitive points of the support, walking on tiptoe, with the heels … enjoying the movement of the foot.

Massage on the reflex points of the feet

In the foot there are reflex points of all the organs. Can we stimulate them? How to interpret them? The foot Reflexotherapy is a therapeutic technique which is tender points and relates to an imbalance or disease.

The doctor can apply this massage technique while taking the patient’s medical history, doing an examination of the foot, which will guide him in the diagnosis. It is not about leaving aside the usual examinations, but about being able to use another orientation tool.

The patient can be invited to practice it himself or a family member in those painful points that the specialist has detected. On many occasions, it is the family members themselves who find a benefit in being able to do something that has a positive effect on their family member.

It is a practice that facilitates and improves the care of people, from a newborn or child to the elderly. It is not necessary to interpret that when we touch a point of the foot we are touching that organ in a reflex way: it is enough that we focus on that touching and alleviating that painful point of the foot favors well-being and health in general

How to prevent foot problems

There are very specific practices that, carried out periodically, keep the feet in good condition:

• You can take care of and regenerate the skin flora, applying yogurt or kefir broth or other non-pathogenic bacterial cultures.
• Expose your skin outdoors and in the sun when it’s not too hot. Dawn is a great time to sunbathe on your feet.
• Walk or run, barefoot or in sandals.
• Step on sand or clay and, after wetting your feet, dry them very well.

How to treat common foot problems

Most disorders can be treated with natural means:

• Calluses It is important to take care of them so that the skin does not lose elasticity. From time to time they have to be filed with a file or pumice stone and then applied a little oil. Painful corns are not due to normal friction, they usually depend on a shoe and are eliminated by changing it.
• Fingernails. The trigger may be the pressure of narrow shoes. The treatment: go barefoot or with shoes that do not press, cut the nails correctly, put the feet in hot water for about 15 minutes, put a cotton pad between the nail and the flesh, and file the edge of the affected nail. If all this does not work, a wedge-shaped cut is made in the middle of the nail.
• Black nail (subungular hematoma). Among its causes there is always a trauma to the nail, either from a blow or from the continuous friction that occurs in a long run or with inappropriate footwear. This leads to a blood clot under the skin. You can go to the podiatrist to drain the blood, which produces great relief. Then it is cleaned well and the foot is left in the air, wearing sandals for a few days at least.
• Athlete’s foot. It is an infection due to the proliferation of fungi of the type Candida albicans or ringworm. Among the causes: cutaneous alteration of the skin, excessive humidity and heat, adding to it lack of sun or ultraviolet rays. Benzoic and salicylic acid, or pills such as griseofulvin and nystatin, are often used for this problem. This can be effective momentarily, but if the infection recurs and these treatments are prolonged, they can be dangerous.