Hi, this is Dana Ranahan at Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver. Now I’m here today with Alicia and we’re going to take a look at her ankle. Alicia is a soccer player and we treat a lot of young soccer players here who end up having ankle pain of one kind or another so I wanted to go through a few basic things that we look for when we look at ankles.
So first of all we take a look at Alicia at standing and see what she looks like at standing. We can see that Alicia has a little bit of a collapse through her foot here, through her arch and she has a hard time keeping a good line of motion through her knee. Now we would look at things such as can you push up onto your toes, raise your heels up and down and what happens as she will do that. She had a little harder time on this right side lifting her arch than she does on the left, she’s correcting it now as I’m telling her.
The other thing we would look at is some functional things where we would have her stand on one leg, so standing on one leg see, lifting your other knee up like you’re marching and see what happens to that arch, and you can see that Alicia has a hard time controlling that foot and it also makes your knee turn in; so these are some functional pieces to our assessment that we would do when looking at ankle pain.
We’ll take you to the treatment room and show you a couple things we do when we look at an ankle more close up.
So we brought Alicia in the treatment room now. We’re going to take a closer look at her actual ankle motion. We showed you a couple basic functional tests which would probably be a little bit more depending upon the complaint she showed up with. In Alicia’s case when she came in actually she’s had a little bit of discomfort with soccer on the inside of her foot which might tie into this inability of her to keep her alignment that her foot collapses when standing which we saw in the other room. So when I take a look at Alicia’s ankle, first thing I’m going to look at is how does it want to move.
Now when we bring her ankle up and down to look at mobility of the ankle joint, the main ankle joint we see that it’s quite restricted and a little bit stiff and it’s like that foot wants to collapse again. When we compare to the other side, this side moves much more centrally so this would be a test we would, a basic test we look at for mobility in the ankle joint, in the talocrural joint. The other thing we would look at is if Alicia had sprained her ankle which again is common, we would do some stress test for different ligaments of the ankle; so in this case we would look at can she maintain good stability when I stress a ligament so if a ligament is torn then that means the joint won’t move too much and lead to pain.
These are some different things that we would look at to determine what sorts of things you need to do for rehab; so for more information or to have an assessment come on in and check us out at Body Works. You can call us at 604-983-6616 or check out our website at www.body-works.ca.