Health Library

Metatarsal stress fractures - aftercare

Broken foot bone; March fracture; March foot; Jones fracture

I Would Like to Learn About:

Description

The metatarsal bones are the long bones in your foot that connect your ankle to your toes. A stress fracture is a break in the bone that happens with repeated injury or stress. Stress fractures are caused by overly stressing the foot when using it in the same way repeatedly.

A stress fracture is different from an acute fracture, which is caused by a sudden and traumatic injury.

About Your Injury

Stress fractures of the metatarsals occur most commonly in women.

Stress fractures are more common in people who:

• Increase their activity level suddenly.
• Do activities that put a lot of pressure on their feet, such as running, dancing, jumping, or marching (as in the military).
• Have a bone condition such as osteoporosis (thin, weak bones) or arthritis (inflamed joints).
• Have a nervous system disorder that causes loss of feeling in the feet (such as nerve damage due to diabetes).

Pain is an early sign of a metatarsal stress fracture. The pain may occur:

• During activity, but go away with rest
• Over a wide area of your foot

Over time, the pain will be:

• Present all the time
• Stronger in one area of your foot

The area of your foot where the fracture is may be tender when you touch it. It may also be swollen.

What to Expect

An x-ray may not show there is a stress fracture for up to 6 weeks after the fracture occurs. Your health care provider may order a bone scan or MRI to help diagnose it.

You may wear a special shoe to support your foot. If your pain is severe, you may have a cast below your knee.

It may take 4 to 12 weeks for your foot to heal.

Self-care at Home

It is important to:

• Rest your foot.
• Elevate your foot to decrease swelling and pain.
• Not do the activity or exercise that caused your fracture.
• Use crutches to help support your body weight when you walk, if walking is painful and your provider advised you to.

To Treat Pain

For pain, you can take ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin), naproxen (Aleve, Naprosyn), aspirin, or acetaminophen (Tylenol). You can buy these pain medicines without a prescription.

• Talk with your provider before using these medicines if you have heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, liver disease, or have had stomach ulcers or bleeding.
• Do not take more than the amount recommended on the bottle.
• Do not give aspirin to people under age 19 years.

Your provider may prescribe a stronger medicine if needed. Tell your provider about any other medicines you are taking as medicine interactions may occur.

Follow-up

As you recover, your provider will examine how well your foot is healing. Your provider will tell you when you can stop using crutches or have your cast removed. Also check with your provider about when you can start certain activities again.

Activity

You can return to normal activity when you can perform the activity without pain.

When you restart an activity after a stress fracture, build up slowly. If your foot begins to hurt, stop and rest.

When to Call the Doctor

Contact your provider if you have pain that does not go away or gets worse.

References

Bettin CC. Fractures and dislocations of the foot. In: Azar FM, Sawyer JR, Throckmorton TW, Jones L, Priggel T, Coble T, eds. Campbell's Operative Orthopaedics. 15th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier; 2027:chap 93.

Rose NGW, Green TJ. Ankle and foot injuries. In: Walls RM, ed. Rosen's Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice. 10th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier; 2023:chap 49.

Smith MS. Metatarsal fractures. In: Eiff MP, Hatch RL, Higgins MK, eds. Fracture Management for Primary Care and Emergency Medicine. 4th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier; 2020:chap 15.

Review Date: 4/13/2026  

Reviewed By: Jesse Borke, MD, CPE, FAAEM, FACEP, Attending Physician at Kaiser Permanente, Orange County, CA. Also reviewed by David C. Dugdale, MD, Medical Director, Brenda Conaway, Editorial Director, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.

A.D.A.M., Inc. is accredited by URAC, for Health Content Provider (www.urac.org). URAC's accreditation program is an independent audit to verify that A.D.A.M. follows rigorous standards of quality and accountability. A.D.A.M. is among the first to achieve this important distinction for online health information and services. Learn more about A.D.A.M.'s editorial policy, editorial process and privacy policy. A.D.A.M. is also a founding member of Hi-Ethics. This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here.

The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.

© 1997- 2026 A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.

All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.