PHILADELPHIA _ Brian Adams was born with very flat feet.
They didn't stop him from playing a variety of sports _ volleyball, baseball, basketball _ in his youth. He grew to be a 6-foot-3-inch man who loved to "run, not jog." Those flat feet served him well.
Until they didn't.
In the last few years, Adams, now 50, started having shin splints. The odd out-toed positioning of his feet compressed a nerve in his leg. "It felt like a burning poker behind my left ankle," said Adams, a state property management specialist who lives in Edgewater Park, N.J. The pain grew so intense that he started dragging his foot "like Igor." Neither a special orthopedic boot nor physical therapy helped. His knees started hurting too. The inside of his foot was numb.
"I was worried that this one issue was going to disrupt the balance and structure of everything," Adams said. "I thought I was just doomed, to be honest with you."
But he wasn't, Steven Raikin, director of the foot and ankle service at Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, told him. That is how Adams ended up in an operating room recently, his bare left foot held high in the air as Raikin prepared to surgically repair its fallen arch. Like many people, Adams had not even known that the procedure existed.
It would not be easy. Raikin would make multiple incisions and then cut, hammer, saw and sew the foot into a more normal shape. Full recovery will take a year, but Raikin said most patients wind up with about 80 percent of normal function, far better than they had before surgery.
Foot problems are among the most common complaints of middle and older age. They are not trivial. When people's feet hurt, they are less likely to exercise and more likely to fall, doctors said. About a third of people over 65 have foot pain, stiffness or aches. Almost everyone will have it at some point.
"It's incredibly prevalent," said Casey Jo Humbyrd, chief of the foot and ankle division at Johns Hopkins Medical Center and head of health policy for the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society. It's harder, she said, to find older people who don't have foot problems.
