Does Wearing High Heels Cause Permanent Damage?
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Comstock/Thinkstock(SANTA MONICA, Calif.) — The pain you feel while walking in your 6-inch Louboutins and sky-high Prada pumps is a symptom of the real damage high heels may be doing to your body, new research finds.
“The structure of the foot is just not meant to be crammed in the shoe that way,” Dr. Braxton Little, a podiatrist at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, Calif., told ABC News. “It just puts the body in a very unnatural position.”
A first-of-its-kind study published last week in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that wearing high heels could lead to permanent damage of the calf muscles by increasing the mechanical strain on the muscles and shortening the muscles’ fibers, all thanks to the flexed, toes-pointed position of the feet that remains even after you kick off those stilettos.
The Australian study looked at nine women, who ranged in age from late teens to early 30s, and had worn high heels for at least 40 hours per week for the past two years.
Researchers, as reported in The New York Times, used ultrasound probes, electrodes and motion-capture markers to monitor the women as they walked, barefoot and then in heels, along a 26-foot-long walkway.
The findings suggest that the women in high heels walked with “shorter, more forceful strides” and engaged their muscles as opposed to their tendons, leaving them vulnerable to injury and prone to muscle fatigue, the Times reported.
“We think that the large muscle strains that occur when walking in heels may ultimately increase the likelihood of strain injuries,” Dr. Neil Cronin, one of the study’s lead researchers, told the Times.
The damage for heel-wearers is not eased by switching to sneakers or flats, according to the study, because that only increases the risk of injury by forcing the foot into a new position.
The repeated wearing of high heels is widely known to increase the risk of such conditions as osteoarthritis, hammer toes, bunions and corns, but doctors said the damage could be happening in areas beyond the legs, such as the back, and in areas and ways not immediately evident, such as the heart.
“Inflammation inside your body can happen anywhere. It can happen from wearing shoes,” Little, who was not involved in the Australian study, told ABC News. “When we put your foot into a shoe, it has nowhere to go but to bind the toes.”
Homing in on the point, researchers in England last week also released a study, published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases Journal, that found wearing high heels could lead to flat feet, as it can weaken the tendons that support the arch of the foot, leading it to fall, which causes pain and can make it difficult to walk.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio