"Your Child Will Be Normal"

I doubt very much that your parents did not hear these same words about you, when you emerged into the world with club feet. This was, and apparently often still is, the pitch the orthopedists give to parents. Yes, it is understandable - they want to reassure the parents that Little Jenny/Little Johnny will be "just like any other kid."

The prime problem with this, well, snow job, is that it isn't actually the truth. Because the truth, in the case of club feet, is not only not that reassuring, it isn't even something that the doctors have bothered to study, once the "child" becomes an adult. Which, in my view, is a worse violation than merely trying to calm a parent's fears about their child's future.

So, this blog. I am a 56 year-old man with bi-lateral post-club feet. I am also someone who spent more than twenty years in the field of applied biomechanics - making footwear, foot orthosis, working with braces, evaluating and applying appropriate therapies for limb-length discrepancy, and footwear modifications. I also ran my own biomechanics lab for many years, lectured on and wrote chapters for a textbook focused on the above areas. I have also, and to my mind most importantly, done considerable experimentation with various mechanical (footwear and orthotic) solutions for the issues I face as an adult with post-club feet.

Let me explain why I call my condition "post-club feet." There is a parallel condition related to people who contracted polio as children, where many years later, they started getting new symptoms in their previously "unaffected" limb. This eventually came to be known as post-polio syndrome. I won't bore you with all the details, but the parallel is apt - we who were born with club feet were eventually sent out into the world after being told, in many cases, that we were now "normal." Until, for some sooner, and for some a bit later, we began to feel the pain, and slowly became aware that, well, no. We weren't, in fact, "normal."

What we were, or rather, are, adults whose feet, while somewhat normal in appearance, are nowhere near normal in function. I will go into this in some depth on future posts, but for now, I want to get your attention to one quite amazing fact:

Club feet are considered one of the most common muscular-skeletal congenital deformity in the world, affecting 1 in 10000 live births. Yet, despite this fairly large number of affected people, there has never been a true long-term study of adults with club feet regarding the outcomes of their therapies and surgeries. I am NOT talking about following the child until they are 18 - I am talking about following people now in their 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's - to better understand why these adults often have on-going chronic pain issues, and to, from that research, find better surgical solutions, better casting and bracing therapies, better outcomes for their young patients, so they may enter their adulthood without having as many problems as many of us do today.

So, that's why this blog. I am currently designing a comprehensive survey, which will be posted here when complete. The aim of this survey will be to, for the first time, compile as complete a picture of post-club feet as possible, both to aid those of us with post-club feet, and maybe, just maybe, offer a poke in the eye of the medical establishment to help them wake up and begin to understand the truth of the matter.

That despite their pronouncements, we do not have "normal" feet.