Most people with foot drop are offered the same thing first: a brace. An ankle-foot orthosis, or AFO, holds the foot up so your toes clear the ground and you stop tripping. For many patients it is genuinely the right place to start. But a brace is a workaround, not a cure. It manages the symptom while the reason your foot drops stays exactly where it was.
Sometimes a brace is all you need. If the cause is mild, or if it is a nerve that is expected to recover on its own, bracing and physical therapy can carry you through while the nerve heals. In that situation, adding surgery would not change the outcome, and a good specialist will tell you so.
The picture changes when the nerve is compressed, damaged, or simply not recovering. Then the question becomes whether to keep managing the symptom for years or to treat the cause directly. Treating foot drop at its source can involve nerve repair, tendon transfer to give the foot a new way to lift, and targeted nerve transfer, or TNT, which reroutes a healthy nerve to bypass the injured one and restore the signal that lifts the foot. This is advanced work, and it is where many practices stop.
Dr. Arshad Khan performs these procedures. He is one of the few surgeons in the world who focuses on rapidly restoring the motion lost to foot drop, and he has pioneered work in nerve harvesting and nerve rerouting to help restore function and sensation. For chronic nerve pain that has not responded to other care, he also uses neuromodulation to quiet overactive nerve signals that a brace could never address.
The only way to know whether you need a brace, surgery, or something in between is to find out what is causing your foot drop. That is the evaluation Dr. Khan provides at Texas Regional Physicians in Sugar Land.