The Short-term Effectiveness of Full-Contact Custom-made Foot Orthoses and Prefabricated Shoe Inserts on Lower-Extremity Musculoskeletal Pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Foot orthoses are commonly dispensed for musculoskeletal complaints of the foot and lower limb. Few randomized clinical trials evaluate the clinical effectiveness of foot orthoses. METHODS: In this randomized clinical trial with a crossover design, 42 participants wore custom orthoses and prefabricated inserts in their regular footwear for 4 weeks each, consecutively. Twenty-seven participants received prefabricated inserts first and 13 received custom orthoses first. A numeric pain rating scale (possible score, 0-10) was used to measure participant pain. RESULTS: Statistically and clinically important decreases in pain were reported after 3 weeks by participants wearing custom orthoses first (-1.39 pain units, t(12) = 2.70, P = .02). Participants who wore prefabricated inserts first reported no statistically significant change in pain. When the alternative intervention was introduced, participants now wearing prefabricated inserts had greater pain after 1 and 2 weeks (1.1 pain units, t(12) = 3.09, P = .01 and 0.9 pain units, t(12) = 2.65, P = .02, respectively). Participants now wearing custom orthoses did not demonstrate significantly lower pain at any week compared with the second baseline but did have significantly lower pain scores compared with their initial baseline scores (-0.81 pain units, t(12) = 2.31, P = .03). CONCLUSION: Full-contact custom-made foot orthoses provide symptomatic relief after 3 weeks of use for patients with lower-extremity musculoskeletal pain if they are prescribed as the initial treatment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".