How Environment Affects Our Feet

Columbus discovered the world was round and I’m sure when he got back to the docks this knowledge was not met with cries of “atta boy Chris”. I have discovered the world is flat and I believe this news will not easily be accepted either.

Concrete is not a natural phenomenon. We are only the third and fourth generations to walk exclusively on concrete. The human body did not evolve to walk on flat surfaces.

The medical malaise of the last hundred years has changed due to a wide variety of environmental factors, but a major reason has been completely overlooked. Your great-great grandparents never stepped on concrete. And while I am not trying to say that life before concrete was grand, I am trying to point out that there has never been such a profound “evolutionary” change.

I am sure that as life expectancy has increased and people lived longer and longer lives, the orthopedic problems of the aged have not greatly changed, just our ability to actually live longer as the aged. I believe that these problems and the technological advances we have successfully employed to deal with them are applied at the wrong end of the challenge. If we could find solutions to the origins of these problems, we would be able to significantly reduce the lifetime of disability and ever increasing healthcare and societal costs associated with these problems.

I propose therefore that because we primarily interact with our environment through our feet and the way we sit, that the lower extremities and specifically our feet can no longer be ignored as the foundation of the body.

Furthermore, in regard to the fundamental way we address orthopedic problems, we can make a piece of metal the shape of your hip and knee, but when you get arthritis in your ankles we fuse them because an implant that works has yet to be devised. Why? The answer is not that the motion of the foot and ankle are too complicated. The answer is that our explanation of normal and abnormal foot mechanics does not accurately explain the situation. It’s amazing to think that with all the phenomenal advances in medicine, we can't even agree on where the axes of the foot are. We need a better understanding of how feet work.

Now obviously modern foot orthotics have been around for some time, and while some people swear by them and the relief they provide, many people find them to be expensive and inadequate, inadequate because of restrictions of shoe styles and inconsistency of results. We believe that what we have been able to do is devise a method that addresses all these concerns, and does so in such a way that we can predict the results we can attain.

When your feet hurt, you hurt all over! How come we don’t say that when your back hurts, or when your knees hurt? We say this with sore feet because your feet are the foundation of your body and as such are the key to all of the problems I have mentioned and many more. More frightening is the realization that your feet don’t have to hurt for them to cause significant problems higher up the kinetic chain.

What we have discovered is how to keep your feet, and therefore your body, in optimum alignment. The applications for this are tremendous. The amount of money that could be saved, and business generated from the products which employ these principals, is vast. Moreover, the greater good is increased quality of life.

-Dr. Robert Levine