Who writes this, and why you should trust it

Oliver Wakefield-Smith, founder of Digital Signet

I research and write evidence-based consumer health content. I am not a clinician, not a podiatrist, and not a physiotherapist. I cannot examine your foot or tell you what is wrong with it. What I can do is read the primary literature, sit with the clinical practice guidelines, and translate them into something a sufferer can actually use at six in the morning before getting out of bed.

Plantar fasciitis is a condition where the difference between “what the internet tells you” and “what the evidence supports” is unusually wide. Three things shape this site and separate it from the standard plantar fasciitis content:

• · Fasciopathy, not fasciitis. Histology from heel spur surgery (Lemont et al. 2003) points to degeneration, not inflammation, in chronic cases. The “-itis” suffix has misled treatment for decades. This site treats it as the load-management problem it actually is, not an inflammation problem that ibuprofen can fix.
• · The morning routine matters. The single worst pain spike in plantar fasciitis happens in the first few steps after the foot relaxes overnight into plantarflexion. Most plantar fasciitis content tells you to stretch but does not acknowledge the worst pain happens BEFORE you get out of bed. The morning-in-bed routine on this site is built specifically for that pre-first-step moment, and it is the single most useful thing on the entire site.
• · The equipment hub is evidence-led, not an affiliate dump. Plantar fasciopathy is one of the rare conditions where the right shoes and insoles measurably help. The equipment guide on this site ranks options by the clinical evidence and by what podiatrists actually recommend, not by which brands pay the highest affiliate commission. None of the links on this site are affiliated.

How this site is maintained

The research this site relies on comes from PubMed-indexed trials and systematic reviews, and from clinical practice guidelines (most often the APTA / JOSPT heel pain guidelines from McPoil and colleagues, 2008, and the 2014 revision by Martin and colleagues). The full bibliography lives on the references page.

The strength-loading exercise draws on the 2014 randomised trial by Rathleff and colleagues in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, which found a benefit at 3 months but no difference at 1, 6 or 12 months. The DiGiovanni 2003 trial informs the tissue-specific plantar fascia stretch. The histology comes from Lemont 2003.

The site is reviewed on a recurring basis. The “Last reviewed” date in the byline at the top of every page is the date the page itself was last checked against the current evidence, not just the date the page was first published.

Spot something wrong? Email me.

If a clinical claim is wrong, a citation is broken, or a stretch description is unclear, email oliver@digitalsignet.com. Corrections are made within 24 hours and the “Last reviewed” date on the affected page updates with the fix.

The product is the routine, not the page view. If something on the site is making it harder for a sufferer to start their daily stretching, that is the bug worth fixing fastest.