How does cancer affect the foot?
Cancer is described as if you have an abnormal excessive development of any tissue. So does or could cancer impact the foot? Certainly it will, as the foot has all the same tissues as other areas of the body. Cancer in the foot is really infrequent, but when it does happen it has got the potential to be really serious since it is often overlooked or wrongly diagnosed as somethng not too severe. There's two forms of cancer that could possibly impact the foot. One is where the cancer originates in the foot, so this could be in the any tissue from the skin to the bone to joint or the ligaments to the nerves or the blood vessels. For the reason that foot is a weight-bearing part of the body and has many things which can go wrong a really high index of suspicion is required to identify one of these primary cancers from what could be considered a typical and frequent foot problem. That's the reason the competence of a good knowledgeable clinician is needed to take care of foot ailments and to exclude one of these more most likely critical ailments that are unusual.
The other type of cancer that can affect the foot is a metastasis or a spread of the cancer coming from a different part of the body. This cancer may be already be recognized and can spread to the foot where it produces pain in the foot. Alternatively the cancer may start developing in another part of the body and it is un-diagnosed there and it sends a metastasis or spreads to the foot to result in pain in the foot. This is extremely unusual however when it does occur it is extremely serious because it generally implies that the first cancer is more developed. It also creates a diagnostic dilemma for the clinician that is trying to identify the explanation for the pain in the foot. Again, a very high index of suspicion and intuition is necessary by the clinician to pick this up in the early stages. The quicker that these kinds of cancers are recognized the better the outcome is likely to be.
