Assessing Clinical Techniques and Diagnostic Injections for Distinguishing Neuropathic and Inflammatory Heel Pain: A Prospective Hospital-Based Study

Abstract

One in ten people will experience inferior heel pain at some point in their lives, along with plantar heel pain, which is a frequent ailment in the general population. Most experts agree that plantar fasciitis results from persistent inflammation and recurrent partial tears at this enthesis. This study's goal is to assess the effectiveness of using clinical techniques and diagnostic injections to distinguish between neuropathic and inflammatory heel pain. This is a hospital-based prospective study (analytical study) that was performed over a period of 18 months from December 2018. After the approval of the ethical committee, the study was conducted in the Department of Orthopaedics OPD, Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences University Karad. Almost all patients respond to conservative nonsurgical therapy. Surgery is the last treatment option if all other treatments have failed. On one-week, one-month and three months follow up; in all nine neuropathic cases there was already a significant reduction in pain severity (p<0.05).