Why Does My Morning Heel Pain Keep Coming Back? A Dublin Podiatrist Explains

That sharp stab in your heel when you get out of bed is hard to ignore. For patients across Blackrock and South Dublin, this is often the first sign that something is wrong with the plantar fascia. The frustrating part is that the pain seems to ease after a few minutes of walking, only to … Read more

When Does It Hurt? Your Heel Pain’s Timing Is a Clue

Most people describing heel pain lead with where it hurts and how badly.

Both are useful. But there’s a third piece of information that’s often more revealing than either, and it usually goes unmentioned: when it hurts, and how it behaves across a day.

Different causes of heel pain follow genuinely different daily patterns. Once you know which pattern is yours, the field of likely explanations narrows considerably.

“My Child’s Heel Hurts”: A Parent’s Guide to Sever’s Disease

It usually starts the same way. Your child limps off the pitch, or complains going up the stairs after training, or asks to skip a session. By the next morning they seem fine, so nobody thinks much of it.

Then it happens again the following week. And the week after.

Heel pain in an active child aged roughly eight to fifteen is most commonly a condition called Sever’s disease, or calcaneal apophysitis. The name sounds alarming and the condition isn’t. But it does need managing properly, because the alternative is a child who quietly stops enjoying their sport.

Here’s what’s actually going on and what to do about it.