What Mechanics and Podiatrists Share – Understanding How a System Fails From the Ground Up

To look at it one way, nothing could seem more foreign than an auto garage and a medical clinic. One drips with motor oil and is pungent with the smell of diesel, while the other is soaked in rubbing alcohol and covered in clean linens.

Yet despite their differences, the master mechanic and the seasoned podiatrist share something important: They know what a kinetic chain is.

Take a car whose tyres are bald as can be. Any old mechanic will slap a new set of rubber bands on the thing, but this is not how the master mechanic operates. Rather, he’ll know to look ‘upstream’ to discover why there’s uneven tyre wear in the first place and whether it may mean there’s a worn-out strut or a bent control arm; maybe it’s simply bad wheel alignment.

Now suppose there’s a patient who walks into the podiatrist’s office complaining about chronic lower back pain or a throbbing knee. A normal doctor may want to prescribe cortisone for your spine or joint, or maybe even operate. But this is never how the seasoned podiatrist operates. Rather, they’ll know to examine not the top half but the bottom. Maybe the foundation of the whole operation has gone haywire: Perhaps the arches have collapsed, and the foot has been pronating or causing the ankles to roll inward too much, which in turn would cause the tibia and femur to rotate internally, so much so that the whole pelvis and spine are out of alignment. For a Podiatrist Gloucester, contact propodiatry.co.uk/podiatry/podiatrist-gloucester/

Like a sedan with a busted suspension, foot imbalance triggers a chain reaction up the legs, into the knees and hips, all the way up to the back.