Women who wear high heels on a continuous basis will eventually develop arthritis and lower back ache, the president of the Irish Society of Orthopaedic Medicine has warned.
Dr Tom Nolan also advised against a relatively new form of cosmetic surgery which numbs the ball of the foot so women don't feel pain when wearing stilettos for hours on end.
The treatment, injections of collagen into the sole of the foot, is being offered by the Advanced Cosmetic Institute in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. Dr Nolan said if a woman wore high heels day-in, day-out and depended on these injections to do so without pain she was, in the long term, "looking for arthritis in her big toe joint for sure".
She could end up requiring joint replacement surgery. A "more distant" effect was lower back ache as a result of the "altered biomechanics" created by wearing high heels, he said.