My patient wants to wear high heeled shoes what do you recommend?

 Within our range of custom orthoses we have two types of fashion orthoses. These are the “High Style” for women’s shoes with heel height 7 cm or greater, and the “Low Style” for women’s low heeled court type shoes. Visit the “Fashion Range” section of our website to read more.

For either type of device it is best to send the patients shoes separately from their cast to determine the best suited device for  the shoes. Our “free fit to footwear” service will have our highly trained technicians and our biomechanical consultant review the footwear and the patient neutral foot cast to review the device types.

Another point to remember is the 60/40 rule mentioned in newsletter 4 ( Custom Orthoses and Footwear ) in our practice management section of this website. I recommend you have a quick read of this as it best describes the role fashion orthoses play as a second pair choice following an initial prescription for a functional pair of orthoses for female patients.

Do you accept foam imprint boxes instead of casts?

The best and least expensive method of getting your patients foot shape to our laboratory is a neutral non-weight bearing plaster of Paris cast of the foot. If you are unfamiliar with this technique then contact our laboratory and book in for one of our 3 hr training courses. If you are familiar but want to brush up on the correct technique then go to our video section and watch two of our short tutorials titled “The neutral cast technique” and “Good cast Bad cast”.

We do not work with foam boxes because;

• The foam box foot shape produced is not a non-weight bearing shape.

Foam boxes produce either a weight bearing or semi-weight bearing shape.

• The rounded borders and contours of the foot are vital in the correct construction of your patient’s orthoses. Neutral Plaster Casts will always capture these shapes exactly. With foam boxes the borders of the feet and the plantar contours are mostly lost.

• Sending a foam box through the mail system leads to additional damage to the foam impression and, in our opinion, this is just too much of a compromise when you want the correct custom orthotic made for your patient.

I want to order an additional pair of orthotic devices for my patient. Do I need to recast?

The majority of the time, no need to recast. The system we have in our laboratory allows us to store your patients feet indefinitely. Therefore, if your patient lost their devices or needed a new pair then all we need is the code number that is written on the bottom of the orthoses, or the patient and practitioner name for us to pull up the data from our extensive library files.

The exceptions to the using of our stored data are children who have grown or adults who have their devices for over 7 to 10 yrs or a patient having had some lower limb form of reconstructive surgery such as a knee replacement or foot surgery. Then it is always best to recast these individuals to capture their up-to-date foot shape.

Can orthotics be used for chronic heel pain?

 The answer is most certainly yes! The best orthosis our laboratory makes for the condition of plantar fasciitis is a high controlled rigid shelled device such as XT Rigid with MLA prescription. This type of orthoses when correctly broken in will impart an excellent alteration of the foot posture. This in turn will relieve the stress on the plantar structures that cause the pain. You can read more about this condition in our article about plantar heel pain (Public information sheet Plantar Heel Pain).

For patients that still have remnants of symptoms then medical grade cushioning covers can be added to the top of the orthoses shells.