TORONTO - Come summer, we unleash our feet from boots, free them from enclosed shoes and liberate them from socks.

And how do our feet repay us? Cracked heels and blisters, crops of new corns and calluses and rashes of athlete's foot.

That's because summer's heat and special footwear can be hard on feet. But with a little pampering and attention to basics, you can put your best foot forward for sandal season, foot experts say.

"The feet are ignored. We take advantage of them, we ignore them," says Dr. Kathleen Stone, president of the American Podiatric Medicine Association and a podiatrist — foot specialist — in Glendale, Ariz.

Stone and Stephen Hartman, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Podiatric Medicine, have some advice to offer on how to keep your feet happy in the dog days of summer.

Mix it up:People often have a greater variety of summer shoes than winter ones, says Hartman, a chiropodist in Waterloo, Ont. (Ontario still uses that older term for foot specialists; elsewhere the term podiatrist is the norm. Podiatrists can have more training than chiropodists.)

via Winnipeg Free Press

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