In today’s blog I’m going to answer the question do bunion correctors work?
Make sure you watch this video I’m going to talk you through what bunion correctors work best. Here at Sydney Foot Solutions we have been successfully treating bunions for over 20 years without surgical intervention. The good news is you can make a huge difference to a bunion through conservative management and we get asked about bunion correctors all the time. Most bunion correctors are a complete and utter waste of time in my opinion, we have tried many of them out and I think that with when you talk about bunion correctors, our criticism of bunion correctors is that they are completely oversell what they can do for you.
All they are doing is pulling apart your connective tissue. So when I say connective tissue, I’m talking about the stuff in between your bones; if we pull apart that connective tissue, it helps to stimulate that natural lubricant within the joint and it helps to pull apart the connective tissue so you can put it back into a better position. I think that just bunion correctors alone are not going to correct your bunion; they will help you a little bit, but they aren’t going to correct it without proper professional care in my opinion.
But at the end of the day, I’m still going to show you what I think works best and then you if you want to source it yourself, you can definitely go and get it; if not, we actually sell them here in the clinic and we do have them here in the clinic, in fact, we give them to our patients for free if they’re doing our treatment, so obviously I think they work to a degree. With bunion, there’s a whole range of bunion correctors. Let’s just quickly touch on some of the ones that are out there. So, the one that is really, really commonly pushed, particularly on Amazon and those sorts of platforms, is a night splint. So, night splints the research shows, and in my opinion as well, they do not work as well as we would like.
A night splint is almost like it’s got like Velcro around it, and it’s almost like a plastic thing that pulls your toe bit out like that. Okay, and you wear it at night, and it can be very uncomfortable. What I would say is, night Splints were originally designed to support surgical outcomes, so after a surgeon had gone in, cut up your foot, and broken things, when when your body was healing and setting, the nights splint would help to hold it out like that while you were non-weight bearing, particularly when you were sleeping and things like that. So, the problem with a night splint is that, and it’s a problem with all bunion correctors in some respects, is that a night splint will only hold your foot when you’re non-weight bearing, and the difficulty is that when you’re walking, bunions are caused by the way you stand and the way you walk, and the level of force in the way you stand, in the way you walk, is very significant.
The reality is that bunion splints only hold you when you’re non-weight bearing. So, the difficulty is it can correct you, but then when you go for a walk, you push it straight back out of alignment. So, we find then not as good. The other one that we, you often hear, see people bring in is they bring in something that goes between the first and the second toe. And the criticism of that is that the reality is, is that those those devices don’t help as much as we would like because they only separate the first and the second toe. So, what we Often, I find is that they create this sort of level of pressure within the shoe so often they can make them hurt people within their shoe and they often push the rest of the toes across like that which doesn’t do anything to correct your bunion within itself.
We explain in the video which ones we find are best and that we actually use in our treatment process. If you’re worried about your bunion why not book a 60% off initial bunion assessment for $40 https://sydneyfootsolutions.com.au/new-patient-offer/
The reality is, though, is that a bunion is caused by the way you stand and the way you walk, and if you don’t help the way you stand, the way you walk, you probably won’t help a bunion through bunion splints. We approach bunion treatment via a gentle hands-on technique and we work on correcting that level of alignment and then we give you exercises to support those changes and we do that over a process. We take a before x-ray and then we usually take an after x-ray and actually measure the differences and we usually see significant structural change over the course of our of our treatment process.
We see stacks and stacks of bunions and definitely the the key takeaway is that bunion correctors are helpful but be aware they will only take you so far so we always strongly recommend some level of treatment by a professional, if you would like a further in-depth assessment on what what’s actually happening with your bunion. We’re offering a 60% off initial bunion assessment; it’s in the link below, please feel free to check it out via booking here https://sydneybunionclinic.com.au/request-bunion-assessment/
