Episode 148: Exciting News About Foot and Elbow Pain!

What if you could significantly reduce foot and elbow pain in just six weeks? Join Dr. Jake Berman as he uncovers the breakthrough treatment of shockwave therapy, an innovative approach that uses radio pulses to create microtrauma and stimulate the body's natural healing processes. In this episode of the Berman Method podcast, Dr. Berman delves into the science behind shockwave therapy, proving its effectiveness in treating conditions like plantar fasciitis, tennis elbow, and golfer's elbow. Forget traditional treatments with inconsistent results—discover how shockwave therapy can transform your recovery journey by enhancing internal healing mechanisms.

But that's not all! Dr. Berman also shares practical advice for improving posture and reducing dependence on orthotics, along with tips for better foot health. Learn how to gradually reduce tight lacing in shoes and understand the role of improper posture and nerve restrictions in contributing to elbow issues. Stay connected with us through our website and social media platforms for the latest insights and services. Plus, don't miss out on special offers for shockwave therapy at our clinic and the availability of free, information-packed reports designed to help you on your path to a pain-free life. Tune in now and take the first step toward a healthier, happier you!

Check Us Out On Social Media - 
Facebook: @bermanwellness , @physicaltherapynaples, @Berman Golf 
Instagram: @berman_wellness, @bermanphysicaltherapy , @Berman Golf 
Youtube: Berman Golf, Berman Physical Therapy
TikTok: Bermangolf, Bermanwellness

Email us - 
drberman@bermanpt.com 
jenni@bermanwellness.com 

Check out our website - 
www.bermanpt.com 
www.bermanpt.com/wellness
www.bermangolf.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Berman Method podcast, featuring Dr Jake Berman and physician assistant Jenny Berman. We are here to treat problems and not symptoms. Disclaimer this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and not to treat anyone or to give medical advice. If you are interested in any information that we are giving and would like to use this for yourself, we recommend that you contact your primary care physician or reach out to us and ask us questions about yourself specifically. Enjoy.

Speaker 2: 0:35

And we're rolling, baby rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling like Limp Bizkit in the hot dog flavored water from back in the was it 90s or early 2000s. I hope at least a couple of you guys smiled, because I know at least one of you listening has that album or had it. I definitely bought it. Anyways, the Berman Method podcast. Dr Jake Berman here, coming to you solo today. I do not have my lovely co-host with me this morning. We could not get our schedules to match for the past couple of weeks now. It's been an absolutely insane month really. We've been doing a ton of things, a ton of travel, a ton of work-related things and, in the spirit of consistency I know we've been talking about that a lot lately we're like okay, back to a solo episode with me because I'm so entertaining and you guys are just waiting to hear what I'm going to say next, especially now that I don't have my co-host here to give me the evil look, to tone it down a little bit. So, anyways, hopefully I'll keep it between the navigational beacons today and give you some valuable content.

Speaker 2: 1:52

There's two things that I want to talk about today because it affects so many people in this country, and that is specifically foot pain, heel pain, plantar fasciitis All three of those we're going to bunch into one category and the other one is tennis elbow or golfer's elbow. Tennis elbow is pain on the outside of your elbow, golfer's elbow is pain on the inside of the elbow. And the reason why I wanted to talk about these two conditions or these two areas the foot and the elbow is because we just got this brand new toy, shockwave. It's another modality that actually this one actually has evidence-based research behind it. So prior to me being introduced to shockwave, I was very anti-modality because the vast majority of modalities out there well, let's just define what a modality is. A modality is something like ice or heat or a TENS unit. You know those little electricity pads that you can get at CVS or if you go to the cookie cutter or us physical therapy, you're probably going to end your treatment with a TENS unit and an ice pack, or a TENS unit and a heat pack, and there's ultrasound and all sorts of other types of modalities and the reasons why, or the reason why I've been very anti-modality throughout my entire career, is because they don't have solid scientific research to show that they work consistently. The vast majority of the time they can only classify it as a placebo effect or a temporary analgesic effect, meaning that temporarily it took your pain away due to decreasing the sensory receptors. And that's exactly what a TENS unit does, is it stimulates your receptors so frequently, so much that those receptors downregulate and temporarily you can't perceive pain anymore, but then obviously it comes back.

Speaker 2: 4:07

Anyways, fast forward to where I'm at today is I've got this unit that's called shockwave and what it does is it uses radio pulses, so radio waves that it sends beneath the skin. It's non-invasive, doesn't hurt, feels like a vibration. But there's actually evidence based research to back it up. And it's ridiculous how over 90% of the time, it's been proven to help with plantar fasciitis, tennis elbow, golfers, elbow, even knee tendonitis, shoulder tendonitis, in six treatments. And the reason why it helps in six treatments is through the mechanism of which it works. So bear with me for two minutes. I think it's important to go into the weeds here for a minute.

Speaker 2: 4:57

This technology was originally invented, I guess, or utilized in the early 1900s for the purposes of breaking up kidney stones. So it sends radio pulses through the skin to the kidneys to break up kidney stones. So you could pass a kidney stone. Fast forward 90s, 2000s, they found that there was actually a positive healing effect that was occurring in the surrounding soft tissues. So they end up doing a ton of research, a ton of studies and they whittled it down to. There is significant scientific research evidence showing that it has lasting healing effects, not pain relief effects. That's a result of healing right. So lasting healing effects after six treatments. And these treatments are only 10 minutes long and they're only done once a week for six weeks. And the way that it does it is because it's sending radio waves through the skin. It's actually creating microtrauma to the area. So if you can imagine little tiny baby microtrauma so little tiny baby I don't like using the word cuts because it's not really cuts, it's just microtrauma which increases blood flow to the area, stimulates your body's own healing response so that it starts sending in the calvary, sends in your body's own stem cells to start healing that area. So you do it once and give it a week to heal it, then you do it the next week and then it gets another week to heal it, because it generally takes around five to six days for your body to repair itself. And then you do it so on and so forth for six weeks and what happens with plantar fasciitis is you've got a really irritated area. So when you go in there and you stimulate your body's own healing response from the inside out not the outside, which would be me doing manual therapy, which helps out tremendously, this is just something that helps augment the speed at which it recovers. So this is all the backstory, and I wanted to give you the backstory first because I want to get to where we are as a country right now.

Speaker 2: 7:19

For any type of foot pain, you've got Dr Scholz screaming off the top of the roof saying wear a supportive shoe, wear a supportive arch, wear an orthotic, wear this, wear that to help support the foot pain. And what it is. What that's doing is it's creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and a downward spiral in the wrong direction. Because in the arch of your foot alone, there are 16 muscles. Those 16 muscles, their job is to support your foot. There's four layers of four muscles right in the arch of your foot. Those 16 muscles. Their job is to support your foot. There's four layers of four muscles right in the arch of your foot. Those 16 muscles. Their job is to support your foot. When your foot is completely supported, there's no pain. That's why Dr Scholz is making billions of dollars, because his orthotics, his insoles, they're supporting your arch, supporting your foot, so you don't have pain.

Speaker 2: 8:23

The problem is when you put your foot inside of a shoe and you lace it up real tight, or you put your foot inside of a shoe that has an orthotic that's supporting your arch, those 16 muscles don't have to work anymore. So when those muscles don't have to work, they inevitably get weaker. That should be obvious, right? You don't use it, you lose it. If you don't exercise for a week and you go back into the gym, you are noticeably weaker than you were the week before. If you don't exercise for a month and then go into the gym, it's like, oh, my goodness, we're starting at ground zero. Now think about yourself. When did you first start wearing shoes consistently?

Speaker 2: 9:06

For the vast majority of us, it's daycare. It's like we can't even walk yet and our parents are putting us in these little tiny, cute shoes so that we can crawl around on the floor and not let our feet develop. And I've talked about this multiple times on the podcast in the past with Jenny here so that she could defend herself, and this is one of the biggest battles that her and I have with developmental processes if you will, with our own children is these shoes are very cute for our babies, our kids, but they're so rigid that when they do go and stand up and they start cruising or just standing up and holding on to something, the muscles in their feet don't even have to do a thing. So how are the feet, the muscles in the feet, supposed to develop? Because these shoes, they're so cute, right? These little tiny baby converses, these little pink lace-up boots, they're so cute, oh, my goodness, so cute. But, man, they are setting our kids up for failure. So we go back and forth. Jenny will find a cute pair of shoes and I'll test them before we ever put them on Stella's or Vera's feet, and I'll say absolutely not. She's not wearing these. And it creates a little bit of a turmoil situation and I'll stand my ground there. I'll say this is not happening, because this is where it all starts.

Speaker 2: 10:35

When you put your foot inside of a shoe and you lace it up and you've got an orthotic, a supportive insole, the muscles in your feet no longer have to work. There's over 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments in your foot. There's 16 muscles in the arch of your foot alone. All of these things have a purpose to give you support. The purpose is to ground you, be the connection between the ground and the rest of your body. When you put them into a shoe and lace it up, they don't have to do a damn thing. When you put them in, ladies, when you put your foot into a high heel, oh my goodness. Yes, you look great, damn great, but, oh my goodness, it is destroying your feet, and that's an obvious one. I mean, I don't know very many women that don't hate wearing high heels for a prolonged period of time because they make your feet hurt, feet hurt.

Speaker 2: 11:46

So anyways, coming back full circle, the answer is not spending hundreds, if not thousands, on inserts, orthotics, supportive shoes, supportive flip-flops and now they even have supportive slippers, so that you can walk from your bed to your bathroom in the middle of the night without foot pain. It's like are you freaking, kidding me? This is not the answer, because now you are addicted, you're restricted. You can't walk anywhere without that support or it's going to kill you. You can't walk on the beach and feel the sand between your toes because you don't have the support anymore. I know that there's people listening to this right now that can relate to this If you wear a supportive orthotic and a supportive shoe for the vast majority of your week and then you decide you're going to go walk down the beach for a mile good night, game over you are going to be in some serious pain sooner or later.

Speaker 2: 12:46

So anyways, come back full full circle. When you're wearing these supportive shoes, your foot is supported. When you're not wearing the supportive shoes, that's when injury occurs because the muscles had gotten so weak because they have not had to work that. That, when you're not wearing the shoes and you are walking around the house sporadically without your supportive slippers on, when you are walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night without your supportive slippers on, when you do walk around on the beach without your supportive shoes on, that is creating microtrauma and creating issues to that area. That's what creates the inflammation.

Speaker 2: 13:32

Now this is where things get really interesting. That microtrauma creates inflammation and pain and forces you to say, okay, I need more support. In reality, what we need is microtrauma plus muscle activation, because right now, what you're doing is you're doing microtrauma plus inactivity. That creates an issue, but if you do microtrauma plus muscle activation. So you're actually activating the muscles surrounding the area. Then you're increasing blood flow to the area, you're increasing the strength in the muscles and you're actually building an overall more efficient system. So the microtrauma doesn't occur down the road.

Speaker 2: 14:20

And that's essentially where a shockwave comes in, is we break the cycle, we create microtrauma to the area that is inflamed and injured and where the fascia is just bound up right and it's just thick and not healthy. If you could imagine a nice piece of flame and yawn. That's how the muscles should be. But because they have not been activated and contracted the way that they should, they've shriveled up into dried up beef jerky and it's like no, it's not supposed to be that way. Beef jerky and it's like, no, it's not supposed to be that way. So then we get the muscles firing. So microtrauma plus muscles firing creates a much more conducive environment for healing.

Speaker 2: 15:08

So then within six weeks you've got a completely different ecosystem in your foot than you did six weeks prior to this. So now we can say, oh, wow, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I don't need to be confined to these $500 or $750 pair of custom orthotics that have to go into any pair of shoes that I want to wear. Maybe I don't have to be confined to these ugly supportive sandals that I really don't like because they don't match anything but one outfit and they're just not cute. Because now the muscles are doing their job, and when I first started I said that I was going to talk about tennis elbow and golfer's elbow, and it's the same exact thing upstairs. So everything I just got done, saying downstairs the same thing, is happening upstairs.

Speaker 2: 15:59

The mechanism of which it's happening is different, though, and because we're already 15 plus minutes into this thing, I don't want to get into the mechanism of why it's happening. Meaning the mechanism why it's happening in your foot is because you're restricting the mobility of the muscles in your feet by wearing a shoe. The reasons why it's happening in your elbow, long story short, is because of posture, because you're having a restriction of a nerve that's coming out of your neck that goes down and innervates, gives you strength to the muscles in your forearm and that's creating weakness of those muscles, and those muscles get overworked and underpaid and essentially inflamed, and that creates the downward spiral on the elbow. That is a very cliff. Note.

Speaker 2: 16:45

60 second version of a 20 minute long conversation on to help you understand why it's actually happening in the elbow. But the result is the same or not. The result, the plan of attack is the same with the shockwave is we just send radio frequencies down into that pathological area. That inflamed area creates microtrauma which increases blood flow to the area, increases your body's healing response to send its own stem cells to heal the area. Then we strengthen the area with the right muscle activation, the right muscle technique, the right muscle efficiency of the entire system, including postural changes.

Speaker 2: 17:29

A lot of you desk workers out there slouched over same thing with tennis slouched over from your upper body, not from your lower body, where it should be coming, and it heals the area. So I know that I only spent two minutes on tennis elbow, golfers elbow and a lot of minutes on plantar fasciitis or foot pain. Just trust me when I say this this modality shockwave is absolutely amazing and when I say that it means something because I'm so anti-modality, absolutely despise all of them because there's no significant research behind them. They're really just a cookie cutter way of saying yes, I did something. Temporary relief at best. This thing actually works. The science proves that it works.

Speaker 2: 18:24

So, statistically speaking, at least 50% of you listening to this right now have had foot pain, heel pain, plantar fasciitis at some point in your recent life, and at least 25% of you listening to this right now are currently wearing some type of orthotic, some type of supportive insole, some type of supportive shoe insole, some type of supportive shoe, or, at the bare minimum, 75% probably closer to 100% of you are lacing up your shoes real tight or snug. You are the ones that I'm talking to right now. What you should be doing here's a little blue light special for you that you can start working on right now is, if you're wearing a tennis shoe, you should only lace it up as tight as it has to be so that it does not slip off your heel when you're walking. That way, it allows the shoe to splay out as much as it can, because I'm sure it's restrictive in its own design, but at least it'll allow the shoe to spread out, which will allow the muscles in your feet start to work. Now there's a whole process to where you should do this strategically, meaning that if you're a tight lacer upper, you don't just want to go cold turkey and not lace them up at all, or even walk around barefoot, because then you'll really be cussing me. So there's a whole strategy behind it.

Speaker 2: 19:57

The thing that I want to leave everybody with is that right now because this is a brand new thing in our clinic for the month of May and for the month of June, we are running specials on Shockwave in our packages. So if you're interested in this, make sure you reach out right now, especially if you're a snowbird and you're not coming back down until the fall or even January. Make sure you call us this month and take advantage of these specials that we have going right now, because this stuff is like crack. I'm telling you, man, everybody that has tried it so far has absolutely loved it. It feels great, does not hurt, it's quick. You're done with a whole entire treatment in 20 minutes usually around 10 to 15 minutes, and it's only once a week. I mean, this is as close as you could possibly get to pressing the easy button. Seriously, this is like the easy pill, the easy button, but it actually works. So make sure you call us now.

Speaker 2: 21:05

Ask me questions.

Speaker 2: 21:07

I know you got to have some questions.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yeah, jake, it all sounded great, but what about this?

Speaker 2: 21:12

But what about that? But what about that. Let me know what your questions are. Email me drberman at bermanptcom, or text, send smoke signals or even a carrier pigeon. We started getting some carrier pigeons here lately and it's been a lot of fun pulling the notes off their back. It's really changed things up a lot. So if you guys got a good set of carrier pigeons, send those our way, because we do have a honing station here, watering station at the honing station. So let's have some fun with this thing. Make sure you like and subscribe and share this episode with somebody that you know has foot pain, you know has to have their custom orthotics. There's about 0% chance that if you're listening to this and you don't have foot pain, that you don't at least know somebody that has foot pain. This is like the epidemic pandemic worldwide, taking over the nation and the world. Come on, let's stick it to the shoals man and do this thing the right way Like, subscribe, comment, let me know what you think and until next time, keep on keeping on baby.

Speaker 1: 22:20

Thank you for subscribing on your social media and podcast platforms to the Berman Method Dr Jake Berman with Berman Physical Therapy and Jenny Berman, physician Assistant with Berman Health and Wellness. You can find more information on our website wwwbermanptcom for physical therapy. Wwwbermanptcom forward slash wellness for the health and wellness. You can also find us on social media, facebook, instagram, and on your podcast platform, so be sure to follow us, like us, subscribe to us and, if you would like any further information, definitely visit our website and reach out to us. You may also find our free reports on the websites as well, where you can download this free information for yourself. Have a great day.