Clubfoot Success

I’m still struggling away over a post I want to put on the blog but my first try was over 3,000 words and I figured that’s way too heavy. It may well become a 3 part minipost series or something but still needs some serious re-writing. But that will have to wait until my family and I return from four days away in Darjeeling which is just a stone’s throw away from where we live. Very cheap but it’s all we can afford right now.

In the meantime, to leave you with a wonderful, happy success story culled from my wife’s Facebook entry just this very evening. With her permission, I quote what she wrote and supply her photo below:

“This lovely little fellow was born with very severe club foot. They were a nightmare to treat but look at him now. All thanks to the walk for life/LAMB team and Colin Macfarlane.”

 

If you’ve read my post on the Clubfoot work done at LAMB here then you will know something of the work done by the team using the Ponseti method and working through an organisation called Walk For Life which is run by a very nice man called Colin Macfarlane and his team. Their clinics – including this one at LAMB – see hundreds of clubfoot cases and it is estimated that there may be as much as 6,000 children born with this condition every year. Most go well but sometimes a foot just won’t budge or there are other complications. You can make most feet straight without too much bother – mostly just castings that gradually stretch out the foot over a period of weeks – but sometimes there are problems.

This little lad had several complications – an unusual clubfoot, some plasters slipped, correction took a lot longer than expected and so on. My wife despaired of seeing him with normal feet. But here he is – good as new. Contrast this with the photo below taken from a typical clubfoot baby and you get an idea of the scale of the task and the just how much improvement takes place: