Bunion Surgery - Dr. Blake Hale
Dr. Blake Hale discusses bunion surgery.
“A bunion is a deformity at the big toe joint where the great toe drifts to the side and the bone behind it (first metatarsal) starts to drift to the inside of your foot, which is typically the bunion or the bump on the inside of your foot. This is what most people associate with a bunion deformity. Bunions come in a wide gamut of severity. Some people have very minor bunions that are quite painful for them – and some people have quite severe bunions that don't bother them at all, so that can be very difficult to predict
Bunion surgery is almost always an outpatient procedure. It usually depends on what surgery we talk about. You may have just a small incision by the big toe joint where we make a cut in the bone, straighten the big toe joint out with a screw and typically you can walk on that right afterwards. Sometimes we even fuse the big toe joint if that's the best procedure – you can walk on that one immediately afterwards as well. If you have a fairly large bunion and we perform a surgery called the Lapidus, we fuse a joint in your mid-foot and I do usually keep patients off of their feet for two weeks after that procedure just to make sure that the incision heals nicely for them, but you can walk protected and it cam boot after that.
When discussing bunion surgery with the patient it does usually revolve around pain relief. I would very rarely recommend bunion surgery for someone who is just looking for a cosmetic improvement of how their foot looks. So you become a candidate for bunion surgery if it does begin to impact your life and bother you on a daily basis.
As far as recovery is concerned, that does tend to differ based on what procedure is best for you. But for the most part you're non-weight-bearing for two weeks and then I usually have a goal of people being back into their tennis shoes at 4 to 6 weeks after surgery.” - Dr. Blake Hale
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