Which is why physiotherapist, Dee Whitford, has set about a major project to uncover some facts about flat feet. It seems there are a variety of reasons parents bring in their children for an assessment. But certainly some children who have flat feet complain of pain. Again that s something that we re looking at now. We re looking at the way children walk, so we re looking at the step length, stride length, how children walk.
Flat feet are still a huge puzzle to the medical world.
We have 180 children in the study, all of whom have flat feet, as measured currently by podiatrists and we brought children into the study when they had flat feet to a degree where the podiatrist would provide orthotics for those children. And to date what those tests have shown is that children with flat feet are performing as well as children without flat feet. What we found was that there wasn t an association between the amount of pain the children and their outcomes on these tests. Yes, and certainly the anecdotal information we ve had from the parents and the children is that some of the children find relief using orthotics. I think what we need to look at is for which children do orthotics work, and that s the information we don t have as yet.