Foot of the Week – Episode 8 – AFO solutions

In this week’s blog, we focus on a spastic foot and ankle and how an articulated ankle foot orthosis (AFO) will not control plantarflexion. Insightful will manufacture a 3-point pressure system AFO that will help control the deformity.

Video Transcripts: 

Hi, Ian here from Insightful Bracing.  We’ve got a case here I want to show you.  Normally when we see somebody who needs an LI brace, a cuboid lock design, it’s for somebody who’s kind of twisting their ankle like this and has instability laterally.  And what we do is we design the strap here, so it goes right over the cuboid and locks it down, this is for the right foot.

So, recently I got this case here. This practitioner asked for cuboid lock design.  Now this is a non-ambulatory case and the patient’s sitting in a wheelchair and what’s happened is their spasticity is so bad that over time it’s stretching the perineal nerve and causing nerve damage.  So, we agreed not to do an articulated line.  Something like this is not going to handle a spasticity of this magnitude. So instead, what we’re going to do is we’re going to do a design that’s static and puts the three-point pressure system like this and hopefully we’ll get some correction and relief for the patient.  We’re not going to fully correct this patient’s spasticity but perhaps we can give enough correction so that the tension is off and the patient is more comfortable.

So that’s it for Foot of the Week, see you next week.