How To Do A Hands-On Shoe Evaluation

When I was a board member of the American Academy of Podiatric Sports Medicine, one of our Fellows of the Academy, Mark Reeves, DPM, put together a very nice and easy to use three-point, hands-on shoe evaluation (see photo at right or download PDF).

The great thing about these tests is that you can teach them to your office staff and patients very quickly and easily. For the last 10-plus years or so, when I was in practice, we would show patients how their shoes fared with these tests. We did this specifically to show patients when they had substandard shoes and explain how the shoes were likely negatively impacting their feet and contributing to their foot pain.

Most patients would understand the issues and get some new shoes. Of course, now they had a metric to utilize when they shopped so they would be less likely to come back in with another pair of crappy shoes. 

Ultimately, this shoe evaluation gave us a place to start a conversation about what makes up a good shoe versus a shoe that is not so good, functionally speaking. Patients would always tell me that they “always bought good shoes,” to which I would usually respond, “What exactly is a good shoe?” Most patients felt it was a certain price point, of course. However, once we taught them Dr. Reeves’ tests, they had a better idea on what potentially was good and what was not good in certain shoes.

My point in all of this is, what do we all really know about the shoes that our patients wear into our offices? Unless you are regularly cutting shoes in half to examine the way different shoes are constructed, you cannot really make a comparison from one pair to another. 

With this shoe evaluation guide from Dr. Reeves, I think we have a good place to start. I will go a little more in-depth over the next couple of DPM Blogs about what the literature does and does not say about these shoe tests.