The concept of foot orthotic dosing is something that has been bubbling away under the surface for a long time now, but for some reason, not a lot of noise gets made about it, or when noise is made about it, tends to get dismissed by those who want to protect the way they did things.
To introduce the concept, consider this hypothetical analogy: what if a really well conducted clinical trial was done on a very low dose of an anti-hypertensive drug and it shows that the drug does not work at that dose. Should that be used as evidence that the drug is not effective? Of course it shouldn’t, but that is exactly what is done with clinical trials of foot orthoses at low doses. As the methodology and analysis of that hypothetical drug trial was sound, should it be included in the systematic reviews and meta-analyses? It will meet all the textbook criteria to be included in a systematic review and meta-analysis, but, of course, it should not be included as the dose was low. To include it would probably be unethical as it would unreasonably bias the systematic review and meta-analysis in the direction of the drug not working (unless the review stratified the study results into different doses). It makes sense to exclude that study because of the low dose. So, why then is it acceptable to do exactly that in systematic reviews and meta-analyses of foot orthoses?
Tag Archives: biomechanics
How does stuff like this make it into professional journals?
Any publication with the title of A Novel Treatment Approach to Over-Pronation Dysfunction is going to get my attention, mostly because of the nonsensical understanding of “overpronation”. I was not disappointed and it was as bad as I expected.
Even before I got the full paper, just reading bits like this in the preview: “The literature supports a forefoot varus as the most frequent cause of over-pronation compensation. 1,2“. The two cited references did not show that and one was him quoting himself saying that. The alarm bells start going off about a lack of academic rigour and lack of critical thinking skills. A true forefoot varus (based on the textbook definition) is actually quite rare and far from being a common casue of “overpronation”.