Osteoarthritis is starting to become a progressively more prevalent problem in society today, mainly since the population ages. Any joint in the body could very well be affected. The outcome of this osteoarthritis is more acutely felt on the load bearing joints and not any more so than the feet. We want the feet to walk around on therefore if the foot is affected then the impacts on the daily life might be large. A current occurrence of PodChatLive was focused on the question of osteoarthritis and the feet. PodChatLive is a live on Facebook with a pair of hosts who have on an expert each week to talk about a range of themes. It is later available as a podcast in addition to transferred over to YouTube.
In the episode about osteoarthritis, the hosts spoke with Jill Halstead concerning the concept of osteoarthritis and, even more important, the use and type of terminology used around the word. They discussed the occurrence of osteoarthritis impacting on the foot and the relation which it has to load and what the treatment alternatives of its symptoms in the foot are. Dr Jill Halstead is a podiatrist in the United Kingdom and she has worked in the field of foot osteoarthritis for more than 10 years primarily at the University of Leeds with Professors Redmond, Keenan along with other leading rheumatologists. Jill started out her work back in 2007 included in her master’s dissertation which investigated midfoot osteoarthritis and Charcot’s feet and published her initial paper in this subject in 2010. Since that time jill finished her PhD in 2013 that looked over midfoot pain and the function of foot orthotics in prodromal osteoarthritis. She was in a position to develop this concept to radiographic midfoot osteoarthritis. Jill's main focus is in the clinical signs of midfoot osteoarthritis, which are the functional biomarkers of foot osteoarthritis, what is the association between MRI outcomes and discomfort and also the clinical interventions for osteoarthritis with foot orthotics.