Immediate and short-term effects of kinesiotaping and lower extremity stretching on pain and disability in individuals with plantar fasciitis: a pilot randomized, controlled trial.

Background: Plantar fasciitis (PF) can disturb individual's weight-bearing activities. Hence, conservative treatments with immediate effect in reducing pain and improving foot function is required.

Objective: This study compared the effect of kinesiotaping and stretching exercise in individuals with PF.

Methods: Thirty patients with PF were randomly divided into three groups, and received kinesiotaping, stretching exercise, and a combination of the two aforementioned interventions. Pain intensity and foot disability were measured at baseline, immediately after the first treatment, and at one week.

Results: Immediately after the first treatment, all groups showed significant changes in heel pain intensity ( ≤ .012) with the standardized response mean (SRM) of 2.85, 1.96, and 1.43 for the taping, stretching, and the combination groups, respectively. Nevertheless, no significant change in foot disability was found ( > .05). At the one week, all groups continued to demonstrate significant reduction in heel pain ( ≤ .012) with the SRM of 1.78, 2.84, and 2.09 for the taping, stretching, and the combination groups, respectively. While the combination group showed significant reduction in foot disability ( = .024). However, there was no significant difference of the change score in all parameters among the three groups ( > .05).

Conclusion: Improvement in heel pain was observed in all groups after the first treatment. However, improvement in foot function over one week was observed only among those who received the combined treatment. Further studies on larger samples are required to establish the superiority of the combined treatment over kinesiotaping or stretching alone.