l to r: shoe for bound feet; a bound foot that looks more like a hoof
Upper-class women of Imperial China had bound feet because tiny deformed feet were thought to be pretty — and also a sexual fetish for the men. The ideal adult female foot was 3 inches long.
Chinese women of those days had no choice because their feet had developed deformed from being tightly bound with cloth beginning when they were infants. But today, some women in the 21st century willingly torture their feet by wearing towering 7″-8″ platform high-heels.
The picture above was taken with a new £200,000 ($312,820) PedCAT scanner, the first of its kind in the UK, which does a 360-degree scan of the patient’s feet in just 60 seconds. Doctors can then view the resultant 3D image from every angle, spinning it around to view the foot from above, below and the side.
Consultant orthopedic surgeon Andy Goldberg says wearing stilettos pushes and twists bones out of line, resulting in knobbly bunions and other painful conditions. All the body weight gets forced on to the front of the feet, eventually causing unsightly clawed toes that can become arthritic. He says the 3D PedCAT technology is a major advance over traditional 2D X-rays, which could lead to misdiagnoses: “The scanner gives us much more information. It shows the deformity caused by wearing high heels is much more complicated than we previously thought. With high heels, the toes are squashed inside the shoe. The more stiletto-shaped they are, the worse it is. The toes not only get squashed, but they become clawed too.”
Here’s what wearing crippling high heels do to the feet of idolized celebrities. Those bunions and clawed toes don’t look so glamorous now.
Sources: Daily Mail; Rolling Out.
~Eowyn
