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Hi, I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic. I want to talk about custom orthotics. These are inserts that go in your shoe to help with flat feet. So, when patients, when people have flat arches, it puts a lot of stress on the arch of the foot, the ankles, the knees and the lower back and on up.

So, if you think about arches like a stone bridge. So, a stone bridge looks like this. All the weight of that stone gets held up by the arch. So, the arches is the strongest structure that we see in architecture. When that, when that gets flat in the foot or in the case of the bridge, all that stone falls because that arch isn’t there to support it.

So, there’s a lot of structural issues that start from the feet being flat. And, there’s a whole industry around solving this problem. From Good Feet, there’s Dr. Scholl’s, there’s a million different options of different prices and different quality and, there are custom orthotics. Most custom orthotics are not that great I’ve found. Because, the way that they’re cast is really kind of simplified. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say a patient has a really flat foot. You have to step into a foam mold or plaster, but it’s primarily foam. What you’ll get is a really flat pancake mold and the company that fabricates does, you know, they fabricate an orthotic, an arch all of that. And, they do so usually really conservatively because they don’t want to do too big of an arch and they don’t really know how much arch that foot will really sustain.

So, case in point. Here’s an orthotic that was done about six months ago. You see how flat this is? I mean it’s got a little bit of an arch here, but these arches really weren’t taking care of the patient’s problem. He got these from a podiatrist. These are the arches that we cast with Sole Supports. This brand is called Sole Supports and it’s the only brand that we use.

You see how the arch is much more dramatic here? This is because the patients arch, this is what it does, and the way that we cast allows for that art to be retained in the casting. So, that we see a real true, custom orthotic. The different, the other difference is, this was $600 and this one is $300. This is so much better of a product for this patient structurally and it’s cheaper. So this is really why we use this product, Sole Supports and why we’ve been so happy with it. It has a big effect on the foot, you know, patients will have Bunyan’s, will have plantar fasciitis. As this arch goes down, it stretches the plantar fascia, which is tissue in between the ball of your foot up here on the heel. It also causes stress here and, on the toes, and throughout.

But, the real difference is structurally biomechanically up in the lower back and the knees as I said it up higher in the back and to the base of the neck. So, this is a really mechanical advantage for patient who has flat feet. And it has a big impact on their health.

This is Dr. Steve Battaglino, with Battaglino Chiropractic and this has been your Health Minute.