Plantar heel pain and plantar fasciitis

Plantar heel pain, also known as plantar fasciitis, causes soreness or tenderness of the sole of the foot under the heel, which sometimes extends into the medial arch. Pain associated with the condition may cause substantial disability and poor health-related quality of life. The prevalence and prognosis are unclear, but the symptoms seem to resolve over time in most people.

We conducted a systematic overview, aiming to answer the following clinical questions: What are the effects of conservative treatments for plantar heel pain? What are the effects of non-conservative treatments for plantar heel pain? We searched: Medline, Embase, The Cochrane Library and other important databases up to November 2013 (Clinical Evidence reviews are updated periodically, please check our website for the most up-to-date version of this review).

At this update, searching of electronic databases retrieved 162 studies. After deduplication and removal of conference abstracts, 84 records were screened for inclusion in the overview. Appraisal of titles and abstracts led to the exclusion of 39 studies and the further review of 45 full articles. Of the 45 full articles evaluated, five systematic reviews and nine RCTs were included at this update. We performed a GRADE evaluation for 30 PICO combinations.

In this systematic overview, we categorised the efficacy for 12 interventions based on information relating to the effectiveness and safety of corticosteroid injection alone (both short-term and longer-term effects), corticosteroid injections plus local anaesthetic injection (both short-term and longer-term effects), customised foot orthoses, extracorporeal shock wave therapy, heel pads and cups, local anaesthetic injection alone, night splints, stretching exercises, surgery, and taping.