Origins

The origins of Root2Being lie in the remarkable journey of a 23 year old woman as she struggled against increasingly severe chronic musculoskeletal pain.

After several years of regular chiropractic treatment for chronic pain, functional scoliosis and a functional leg length discrepancy, she was told her only option was to live with the pain.

Once she saw the x-ray of her twisted lumbar spine (see picture, right), she refused to let the increasingly severe pain she had suffered continue to affect the rest of her life. Instead, she poured what little energy she had left into finding the elusive cause.

At times this seemed an impossible task, but twelve months on and a few hundred web pages later, she stumbled across the missing link that finally led her to the answer. Read the authors full story here.

A paper published in 2002 by an American podiatrist described how differences in the alignment of certain bones in the feet can cause the whole foot to remain at an angle to the leg. Because the structural alignment of the feet is set during feotal development (in the womb), the relative angle of the foot and leg at birth remains constant throughout life.

The most common example is an inverted foot shape, where instead of the sole of the foot being parallel to the ground surface, the foot is slightly twisted inward, causing the inner (medial) side to be elevated relative to a level floor surface.

When someone with this foot shape walks, the inner side of the foot must roll downward and inward to reach the ground. With every step, this downward and inward motion (excessive pronation of the foot) causes the foot to twist out of its' proper alignment. When the foot twists out of alignment, so does the rest of the body.

A mixture of luck and fate brought her in contact with a chiropractor skilled in the assessment and treatment of such foot shapes. An assessment confirmed that she had indeed been born with her feet inverted relative to her leg, clincially known as a rearfoot and forefoot varus. Her case was the most severe that the chiropractor had seen.

The relief of this diagnosis was tremendous. It slowly began to dawn on her that from the day she had taken her first steps, the repeated downward and inward motion of each foot had been causing the rest of her structure to adapt. This constant adaptation was literally forcing her musculoskeletal structure out of alignment. The mis-use of the soft tissues and joints in order to compensate was causing the pain.

A new lease of life

In October 2002, she underwent an assessment using TOG GaitScan, one of a family of new portable diagnostic tools that accurately map the distribution of pressure patterns across each foot during standing and walking. In addition, a physical assessment was also undertaken to determine the relative angular relationship between the rearfoot, the forefoot and the leg of each limb.

Based on the results of the scan and assessment, a pair of custom-made orthoses were created. They are designed to optimise the motion of each foot with every step. In her particular case, they are also wedge-shaped, filling in part of the gap between the inside or medial part of her foot and the ground. This wedge (post) prevents the foot from excessive rolling inward and downward to reach the floor.

With the orthoses stabilising her feet, the muscles throughout her body were given their first chance to heal. Her body was now free to "unlearn" the years of built up tension and adapative ways of moving that it had acquired.

A reduction in pain was felt within the first few days of wearing the orthoses. After 6 months, there was around a 60% improvement in her level of pain and general well-being. Less than 18 months on, and she has experienced a phenomenal whole-body change. She is now virtually pain-free, her muscle strength, tone and overall posture has effortlessly improved, her balance and sense of freedom and movement has been reborn, she is much more relaxed and easy-going, emotionally more able to cope with a range of situations and she has experienced a tremendous improvement in her short-term memory, clear-headedness and ability to concentrate. Nearly 2 years on and she still continues to improve.

She knows she can never change the abnormality she was born with, but wearing the orthoses will enable her to control its' adverse affect on her body and mind for the rest of her life.

The birth of Root2Being

The authors' experiences challenged her own views on many aspects of health, not least on topics such as feet, poor posture, chronic pain and nutrition. The more she learnt about the relationship between foot function and the health of the rest of the body, the more she began to question why the knowledge that had totally transformed her life wasn't readily available.

The prevalence of congenital (present at birth) structural misalignments within the feet is very common; around 7 in 10 people are estimated to be affected, although the degree of misalignment ranges from the very slight to the severe. This knowledge, combined with her own experiences, meant she was beginning to see a clear potential relationship between structural variations during feotal development in the womb, the resultant abnormal function of the feet to compensate and a vast range of long-term health problems, from back pain to fibromyalgia.

From first hand experience, the author knew that by optimising and in turn stabilising the motion of the foot through every single step, these long term problems could be substantially reduced and even eliminated.

She reasoned that if her case had gone undetected for so long, surely many thousands, if not millions of others were also suffering in a similar way. Yet due to a lack of understanding about the relationship between structural foot alignment and overall health, they and their practitioners were totally unaware of the root cause of the problem.

Realising the importance of her findings, she developed Root2Being as a tool for sharing her knowledge, experiences and understanding. She hopes her work will provide a global platform from which the fascinating relationship between foot function and the health and well-being of the entire body can be further investigated. In turn, the long-term health and wellbeing of millions of people can be significantly improved.