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A strong foundation makes for a strong structure. Feet are the foundation of the Human structure. Having strong and healthy feet is imperative to good posture and overall health as well. Feet play an important role in your daily life. Your feet help you move, play, and do just about anything you intend on doing. Movement is crucial to a human being’s function and survival and feet are the most vital body part that helps us move. That’s the importance of feet in one’s life. Any problem with our feet hinders our daily life routine drastically. Diabetic patients are much prone to foot problems but natural helps for diabetes and proper diabetic foot care can help refute the problem.
Why Should You Take Care Of Your Feet?
Scientists estimate that on average a regular person walks 100,000 miles in his or her lifetime. Your feet are what get you from one point to another. So, feet are of paramount importance in all of our daily lives and chores. Our foot has 26 bones and 33 joints and comprises a complicated network of arteries, veins, and tendons.
Feet are fundamentally important for mobility, good quality of life and essential human productivity. Depending on what a person does, the importance of feet becomes more pronounced. If you are an athlete or dog walker, even if you are a nanny or a football player, your feet become even more important. Then they are the tool to achieve your financial productivity.
- Bad foot health can affect your quality of life.
- Bad foot health can mean loss of productivity.
- Bad foot health can lead to less physical activity which perpetuates the issue.
- Bad foot health can lead to loss of finances due to inability to work.
- Bad foot health can lead to permanent disability.
Effects of Bad Feet Health on Life
Losing your feet and finding it unable to walk ever again is a dreadful thing to even think of. What will you do? What would be implications for your mental and physical health? What would it mean for your financial security? Well losing one’s feet is a very grim reality for people with complicated diseases like diabetes.
The Importance of Diabetic Feet Care
Neglecting your feet health is not an option; especially if you are diabetic. This neglect can lead to a variety of health problems, like diabetic foot problems for instance. Feet are the farthest organ from the human heart.
Many of the diseases that arise in the human body can restrict or slow down blood flow to these essential extensions of our body. This can mean that your feet are not getting any oxygen which is very important for movement. This can eventually lead to a slowdown in the body’s mobility, which can have negative health implications like that of chronic diabetic foot problems.
Diabetes is a disease that occurs when blood sugar or glucose in the body is too high. Sugar is the main source of energy in humans. When we consume sugar in various forms, the body produces a hormone called Insulin which helps glucose to be used as energy in the cells. Insulin converts extra sugar into other molecules and saves it in the body to be used later.
In diabetes patients, this insulin function can become limited due to insulin resistance or a decrease in insulin sensitivity. People can have higher blood sugar in the body at all times leading to multiple complications.
Complications with Diabetic Patients
Minor wounds, cuts, scrapes are all part of life that cannot be avoided. People with diabetes suffering from such events can have complicated body reactions. Diabetic patients can develop wounds that heal slowly, partially heal or never heal in some cases. This can lead to infections.
Infection can then spread to tissue and bones (osteomyelitis) and sometimes become life-threatening as it spreads to the whole body (sepsis). Other conditions that can develop include gangrene where tissue destruction can happen leading to a possible infection. People who do not have proper wound recovery from diabetes can also develop other complications like kidney disease, eye problems, and heart disease.
Types of Diabetic Wounds
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332218374031
Healing Process is affected in Diabetes
Diabetes can cause neuropathy or nerve damage. This can have a direct effect on wound healing. Uncontrolled blood glucose can damage the nerves in feet. This can cause numbing sensations. In such a condition, people with diabetes sometimes don’t even realize that they have a foot injury.
People with diabetes also have an increased risk of developing bacterial infections in their wounds. Certain factors augment this risk such as dry and cracked skin, impaired sweating, and toenail infections. A diabetic may also suffer complications as they have decreased production of healing and growth hormones, their bodies have decreased production and repair of new blood vessels, weakened skin barrier, and a reduction in collagen production.
When a person with diabetes gets such an infection in their feet, their feet might be amputated by the doctors to avoid the spread of the infection. This can cause so much more than disability in diabetic patients; it dramatically impairs their future in so many ways (as in the list above). Even if an infection does not develop, slow healing can mean difficulty walking or exercising. This can mean poor quality of life and adverse effects on overall health.
Diabetic foot care then becomes essential. People with diabetes must keep their blood sugar levels down and practice good foot hygiene to avoid any such adverse effects.
10 Good Feet Hygiene Routine
You should take special care of your feet if you have diabetes. Foot care is not simple especially if you have a complicated disease. You have to stay on top of foot hygiene and follow a set of instructions weekly, to avoid any complications. These ten steps should be included in your weekly foot care routine:
- Inspect your feet daily for any cuts, bruises, red spots, blisters, bumps, and lumps.
- Wash your feet daily as well. Use soap to completely lather up your feet. Use water to rinse off and dry them with a clean cloth or towel. Do not forget the area between your toes.
- Trim your toenails properly. Do not dig or cut off corners. Cut straight across and do not cut nails too short.
- Never use any household items like razors or creams to trim off or dissolve corns or calluses. Always consult a doctor.
- Wear clean socks. Change them daily. Use padded socks if you can; especially material with moisture-wicking properties.
- Check your feet for temperature difference, this can signal lack of blood flow in your feet.
- Check for loss of hair if any. This can also signal the loss of blood flow to the area.
- Use diabetic dry skin cream like Pedi Cream, to ensure that your feet are moisturized and do not suffer from cuts and bruises due to dryness.
- You can also use specially designed diabetic foot pain relief cream if you have painful feet. Do not use such creams over open wounds. Always consult a doctor before applying diabetic foot creams if you have open wounds.
- Always make sure that you properly rub in the cream or any lotion that you use on your feet. The moist environment can favor fungal growth. Gently massage the cream into your feet, till it’s dry. It only takes a short time to see great results.
Diabetic Foot Care Products
There are multiple diabetic foot care products available in the market that can provide relief from dry, painful and chapped feet. These include:
Diabetic Foot Cream for Dry Feet
If you have painful and chapped feet with wounds, you should try foot cream for diabetes, which is specially designed to lessen the severity of diabetic foot problems. Diabetic foot care products such as foot cream for diabetes like Pedi cream are specially designed to lessen the severity of problems suffered by diabetics through softening the affected skin.
Pedi Cream, a foot cream perfect for diabetics because it has special ingredients that help get rid of even the worse dry feet. The cream is a must-have for diabetic patients since good foot care limits the complications that may arise due to diabetes. When you take care to moisturize your feet well, this helps to keep complications away.
Diabetic Feet Pain Relief Cream
The other type of diabetic foot care products is pain relief creams. Foot cream for diabetics such as our Pain Away Best Arthritis Cream can help you lessen the pain in your feet which has resulted from neuropathy and other concerns which often accompany diabetes. Arginine Blood Circulation Cream can be especially helpful for those who suffer from the pain due to a lack of circulation. Pedi Cream can help with pain to some extent by providing relief from dry feet, which are the usual cause of many of these diabetic foot problems.