Simon's adventures in Podiatryland: Part 4 - Marco's feet are on fire!

I continue to plunder the dark recessed of my ever-enfeebled brain for memories of cases that have intrigued, bemused and scared the bejesus out of me over the years.

This one involves a young lad called Marco and he firmly fits into the last of these categories, because, I really thought he might die on me.

He was 11 years old, a familiar and welcome figure in my waiting room, a lovely young fella who lived to play soccer (I never call soccer “football”, because that term is reserved for the great and pure game of Australian Rules Football.)

Marco was pretty good too and was playing a lot of soccer because he really was good.

Like many junior athletes, Marco was playing school, club, and representative soccer, so basically, he never bothered to take his footy boots off, there was no point!

He had a long history of biomechanical problems contributing to overuse injury which included:

Left patellofemoral pain and left patella tendonitis, as well as low back pain related to a spondylolisthesis.

He also had already developed a Stage 2 Hallux Abductovalgus deformity. So, he was a bit of a challenge!

He had been prescribed custom orthoses and load management which was keeping the knee issues at bay, but one day he came to see me with something different, something very different indeed.

Simon Bartold
Director of Bartold Clinical