A researcher at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, compared the effect of customized foot orthotics in addition to usual care (UC) to UC alone and found that patients with chronic, nonspecific low-back pain following a work-related low-back injury had greater improvement in short-term outcomes when both orthotics and UC were used than with UC alone.
Sixty-two patients who presented consecutively with more than three months of chronic, nonspecific, low-back pain following a work-related low-back injury were included in the study. Thirty patients in the UC group were given a six-week exercise therapy program and prescription analgesics. The 32-cohort orthotics group received UC and customized foot orthotics. All subjects completed the Oswestry Disability Index at the beginning of the study and after eight weeks. Work disability, defined as working at the pre-injury job labor level, was also recorded at the beginning of the study and after eight weeks. The groups were well matched in terms of age, gender distribution, and duration of low-back pain as well as baseline Oswestry Disability Index score. Twenty-eight participants in the UC group and all members of the orthotics group completed the study.
According to the researcher, both groups had improved after eight weeks, but the orthotics group had a lower Oswestry Disability Index than the UC group with a smaller proportion of the orthotics group using any form of prescribed analgesics for back pain.
The study was published in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.
