Travis Stork: If you are a parent, you know the feeling of when you do anything within your power to help your children's health but how do you decide when you should let them go under the knife for an elective surgery. Irene suffered with painful flatfeet her entire life, she worries her daughter will suffer the same feet. So when she heard about a new surgery, she jumped at the chance to let her ten-year-old Emily go under the knife.
Irene: I went into Dr. Sadrieh's office one day, concerned about my own foot. I have a collapsed arch. I asked him if he was ready to go and he said, it was and I went and had my daughter checked out and it turned out that her foot was just as bad as my own.
Emily: I get pain in my legs sometimes, it starts to hurt right here on the side of my feet and on my toe.
Irene: Her foot has the same pain. I just wanted her to live a normal life and be able to do all the athletic activities she wants to.
Dr. Ali Sadrieh: So pronation or flatfoot deformity is when your foot collapses and when the foot collapses, the joints aren't positioned in the normal position they are supposed to be. What we can see on Emily's x-ray is her foot collapses in the mid portion where the arches supposed to exist. The implants can be placed right inside this region, allowing this to control her foots that doesn't collapse and flatten out.
So now we are going to make the first incision and we are going to dissect down and there we are in the magic spot. So we are going to trick in foot; it's very similar to when you plant a tree, a little sapling, it's very flimsy. So you put a stick by it, you tie it, the tree grows, it gets solid enough and strong enough and then you can remove the stick.
Now I am just putting my finger on there, honey, because I am going to feel where the implant goes. The pediatrician said that she will grow out of it. My mentors, myself, the people I trained with, we talk about this and very passionate about this. She is not going to grow out of it. She is going to grow into it.
So compare to everything that we have done on this show up to now, the hammertoe surgeries, the toe shortenings, and bunions correction, this is by far the most important because we are preventing all of those. So now we are placing the implant in the foot. Once it's in the appropriate position, this is the pressed foot, so we bump it in nice and tight. Look at that. It fits completely and her foot stays straight up, instead of buckling all the way up.
Irene: Look at how straight her legs are, you can tell --
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