Article

Are your high heels a personal injury waiting to happen?

Did you ever consider that fashion could possibly be dangerous? I lost count of the number of times my mother told me I'd break my neck wearing my 4 inch heels as I left the house for a night on the town. When Michael Jackson was recently spotted wearing pointed heels with skinny fit jeans, I had to wonder if his mother had said the same thing.

Yes, it seems that even the king of pop has fallen victim to keeping up with the latest fashion trends, although why he chose to wear women's fashion instead of men's is anyone's guess. According to the latest reports from the gossip magazines, it seems the 48-year-old singer was attempting to remain anonymous on his latest holiday abroad. Who would have thought the paparazzi would have spotted him holding a fluorescent orange bag and wearing a blue floppy hat? Not me that's for sure!

And how did he cram his feet into those tiny little shoes? It's surprising that Michael didn't fall and suffer a personal injury when he was holidaying on the French Riviera. I definitely know how painful it can be to fall over when you are wearing such high heels. Cobbled streets are the worst and trying to stay on two feet whilst staggering down a flight of stairs into a nightclub after you've had a couple of drinks can also prove to be somewhat challenging.

Well, I failed to meet this challenge a couple of years ago and I can imagine that the video evidence of me falling in front of the CCTV camera is used for training members of staff about the dangers of women wearing heels when they've been drinking.

Although I might laugh at it now, I was in a lot of pain at the time. When I started to walk down the staircase, my stiletto slipped from under my foot and sent me hurtling towards the cloakroom at the bottom of the steps. I found it very difficult to stand on my foot and the manager of the club thought I had suffered a serious ankle injury so phoned for an ambulance.

I was taken to a nearby hospital and doctors told me I had suffered a severe sprain and would recover from my personal injury by going home and staying in bed for a few days. I was also worried that I might have sustained a serious back injury when I fell on the steps but the pain and the bruising subsided after a few days.

Fortunately for me, I'm not the first person to hurt themselves in a stiletto accident. Celebrities have also had their fair share of trips and falls and women across the globe united in cringing when supermodel Naomi Campbell tumbled in those extra high Vivienne Westwood platforms on the catwalk in 1993.

Catwalk photographer, Sheridan Morley was working for The Independent when Naomi famously fell in the blue shoes and remembers how nearly everybody wanted to print a copy of the photograph that captured the model falling.

She said, "That picture was worth thousands for those of us who managed to capture it."

Naomi acted like any professional model would and laughed it off before standing back on her designer stilts and finished her runway walk. She was lucky to escape suffering a personal injury in the fall.

This unfortunately can't be said for the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who tore the tendons in her foot last October whilst running down a street in New York. SJP is famous for playing the glamorous Carrie Bradshaw in the smash hit series Sex and the City and her character often strutted down the streets of Manhattan in a glamorous pair of Manolo Blahnik's or Jimmy Choo's.

But years of wearing the 4 inch heels have had a damaging affect on the 41-year-old, whose feet finally gave in last year and said enough is enough.

She said, "I ran down the block a few weeks ago in these heels, just like I did for seven years, and woke up in the night in agony. It turns out I has torn the tendons in my foot - just from running in heels."

How she managed to spend so many years in her shoes baffles me, especially now I know how much it hurts when you fall from the great height of 5ft 9inches. You could say that after all those years of my mother nagging about neck injuries, it turns out she was right. I could have suffered a serious personal injury by tripping in my heels.

I've learnt my lesson about the dangers of wearing high heels. Hopefully somebody will warn Michael Jackson about the affect his pointy stilettos could have on those miracle dancing feet in the future.

This article may be published on another website free of charge, on the condition that a link is provided from this article to our website: http://www.youclaim.co.uk