Days after her daughter became engaged a year ago, Sheree Reese went to her doctor and said she would do almost anything to wear stilettos again.
"I was not going to walk down the aisle in sneakers," said Reese, a 60-year-old professor of speech pathology at Kean University in Union, N.J. She had been forced to give up wearing her collection of high-end, high-heeled shoes because they caused searing pain.
So Reese, like a growing number of American women, put her foot under the knife. The objective was to remove a bunion, a swelling of the big-toe joint, but the results were disastrous.
"The pain spread to my other toes and never went away," she said. "Suddenly, I couldn't walk in anything. My foot, metaphorically, died."
With vanity always in fashion and shoes reaching iconic cultural status, women are having parts of their toes lopped off to fit into the latest Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Cheerful how-to stories about these operations have appeared in women's magazines and major newspapers and on television news programs.
But the stories rarely note the perils. For the sake of better "toe cleavage," as it is known to the fashion-conscious, women are risking permanent disability, according to some orthopedists and podiatrists.
"It's a scary trend," said Dr. Rock Positano, director of the nonoperative foot and ankle service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan.
Positano said his waiting room increasingly is filled with women hobbled by failed cosmetic foot procedures - those done solely to improve the appearance of the foot or to help patients fit into fashionable shoes.
More than half of the 175 members of the American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society who responded to a recent survey by the group said they had treated patients with problems resulting from cosmetic foot surgery. The society will soon issue a statement condemning the procedures, said Rich Cantrall, its executive director.
The American Podiatric Medical Association is also likely to formally discourage medically unnecessary foot operations, said Dr. Glenn Gastwirth, executive director of the group.
"I think it's reprehensible for a physician to correct someone's feet so they can get into Jimmy Choo shoes," said Dr. Sharon Dreeben, an orthopedic surgeon in La Jolla, Calif., who is chairwoman of the foot and ankle society's public education committee.
