Lateral ankle instability can be a debilitating condition.What is it? How does it happen? Is it common? It can happen many ways. Women seem to be more prone to getting it than men. Why is that? Women have ligaments that are more lax- they have a hormone called relaxin that helps the pelvis expand during pregnancy and child birth. So their ankles  or other joints can be affected as well.  Basically lateral ankle instability is what it says, you have an unstable ankle joint regarding the outside (lateral) ligaments. Symptoms include multiple sprains, a feeling of instability constant pain and swelling. It can be torn ligaments to torn peroneal tendons and sometimes the ankle joint can have an osteochondral defect from the multiple sprains. It can make exercise and even daily walking painful. Many times it starts with a sprain that does not heal properly. I have seen many misdiagnosed ankle ligament tears that were thought to be sprains. MRI was not taken and the patient thought they just had a bad sprain but it was really a tear. So it was not immobilized properly and physical therapy was not done at the proper time, which leads to a chronic unstable ankle. What are the treatment options can it be fixed. There are many options available to treat an unstable ankle. there are ankle braces and custom molded ankle braces such as a richie brace which can help stabilize the ankle. see picture below

Lets say an ankle brace fails or you don’t want to spend the rest of your life wearing an ankle brace. You can be an athlete that its affecting your game . The solution to that is a surgical procedure called a lateral ankle stabilization. Here at the Advanced Foot And Ankle Center Of San Diego we have developed and perfected certain surgical procedures to stabilize ones ankle that will get you back to recovery fast and your ankle will feel like new. Look out for our next post which we will discuss the various procedures to stabilize your unstable ankle.