How long do injections for heel pain last?

Injections of corticosteroid medication in the heel do not have a length of effectiveness as many people assume.  The medication either works or it does not.  The steroid medication will alter and disrupt the chemical process that allows inflammation to take place.  The medication will either reduce all the inflammation, some of it, or none of it.  It typically can take up to a week to ‘work’, although some people see immediate results.  When people feel relief for a few days or weeks, but then have a return of the pain, it was not a failure on the part of the injection medication to ‘last’, but rather a return of the inflammation due to the strain and structural factors that caused the inflammation to develop in the first place.  In this case, the medication worked, but the underlying cause of the tissue damage persists and allows for more inflammation to develop.  A couple repeated injections can often overcome this in the short term, but the structural problems that cause the foot strain in the first place still need to be addressed for complete relief.