I have one in each foot, a Morton’s neuroma. It feels like a lump in the ball of my foot above the separation of the toes and hurts when I step or press on it. Someone here on fluther helped me figure out what was wrong and what kind of doctor I should see.
A shot of cortisone could do the trick, but it might not. Sometimes the cortisone injection can shrink the neuroma and it may actually go away. That seems to have worked for @susanc. In my case, one shot wore off in about two months, another in about three weeks, and I think the third one did nerve damage without helping at all. The podiatrist said that the effectiveness of the cortisone decreases over time and so you should space them out as much as possible and not have one unless you are in such pain that you can’t walk.
“It’s just pain,” he said. “It isn’t doing damage otherwise.”
I had to alter my yoga exercises to avoid hyperextension (bending the toes backward as in this photo). That, said the doc, is the worst thing for a neuroma. Instead he gave me an orthotic (an insert for my shoes) with a cushiony patch that helps shape my toes the other way. Shoes with good support are important too.
Since the transition from one yoga pose to another involves a lot of hyperextension as you go up and down, I really lost my ability to do the exercises well. There’s no flow. I imagine it must be much the same with dancing, although I am not a dancer. I had to adapt my progression of poses to avoid that foot position.
This ended when I wound up with a stress fracture in my arch and had to stop yoga altogether. The stress fracture is unrelated to the neuroma but apparently not unrelated to the exercise. I didn’t know you could hurt yourself doing gentle exercise, but I guess you can, at least at my age.