Oprah says her bunions were outed when the paparazzi got a picture of her without shoes on, and she wants to know what causes them. Dr. Oz says about 90 percent of bunions are hereditary. If your foot has bones that naturally splay out, and you put them in a high heel, squeezing the toes together into a narrow toe box, the splayed-out bones continue to go in the wrong direction. "It's a recipe for bunions," he says.
If you have bunions, Dr. Oz says there's only one indication of whether it needs to be operated on. "Pain, pain, and pain. If you don't have pain, you're not operating on them," he says.
Fixing a bunion requires shaving off a bit of the splayed-out bone, cutting the bone below the bunion and pushing in the splayed-out bone to straighten the toe. "This is not an operation you pop back on," Dr. Oz says. "Our feet are critically important to our well-being."
