How can you protect your feet if you have diabetes?

Host: How can you protect your feet?

Kathy Reily: It's fairly easy to protect your feet, just a couple of things that we recommend that you do on a regular basis and one thing would to be do a daily foot check. Foot check can be done at bedtime, it can be done when your bathe or shower, whenever you just have a few spare minutes, but important to check each foot, check the top of your foot, the bottom of your foot, the heel area because it gets very dry and cracked and in between your toes. What you are looking for is a sore or a cut, a blister, a reddened area, a tender area that may not have been there before and if you find an area that is suspicious, if you feel that it is not healing or looking better or getting better, we generally recommend after a three or four days to call your physician and he or she could take a look at it just to make sure that there is not an infection. One of the reasons you want to check your feet is that if there is an open sore or cut that's an entry point for bacteria and more likely, an infection could develop. You can also do a couple other things to protect your feet one is if they are dry and cracked use some kind of lotion and that helps protect them. Don't put lotion in between your toes but you can put it on the top, the sides or the bottom.

If you have difficulty getting to your feet and looking at them, you can use a hand mirror or you may even ask a family member to help you check your feet. We recommend with new shoes that you buy your new shoes later in the day. Our foot actually gets a little bit larger as the day goes on and new shoes will feel more comfortable if you purchase them later in the day. Don't buy them in the morning.

If you do wear socks make sure that your sock is not too tight that it should not cause any constriction in your ankle area or in your calf area. When you take it off if you do see a ring around your ankle or your leg with an indentation that could mean that some of the blood flow has been restricted down to the foot area.