I’m excited to do my inaugural blog post about Foot typing and functional foot orthoses. For those people who don’t know me. I Graduated as an Australian Podiatrist in 1994 and I am also a US Certified Pedorthist. My specialty is biomechanics and functional foot orthoses. I have been working part-time for the QUADRASTEP SYSTEM® as a biomechanics instructor for the past couple of years and I have recently become their Education Coordinator.
I first heard about foot typing and the QUADRASTEP SYSTEM® when I was attending a Podiatry convention in Las Vegas about 4 years ago and I heard a lecture by Dr. Louis DeCaro, DPM and he kept referring to foot typing and how all the patients he sees get assigned a foot type. I was fascinated by this concept and liked the idea of having a standardized assessment model for patients. One of my pet peeves is the fact that if a patient goes to see a foot practitioner for foot orthoses and then sees someone else that patient can end up being prescribed and dispensed different types of orthotics for the same condition! This is very confusing for patients. It is a different story in the world of Optometry, for example. It doesn’t matter where you go and who you see, anywhere in the world, if you need eye glasses you are going to get the same glasses prescription no matter where you go.
Anyway time went on and I happened to see Dr DeCaro lecture at another convention and in this lecture he went into the Basics of how foot typing works and doing the assessment on the QUADRASTEP SYSTEM®. My first thought and initial reaction was that I wished I had of known about this when I was in Podiatry school it would have made my life much easier. I made a decision at that point that I really wanted to find out more about this and be able to teach it to others and I’m pleased to say that I have been able to do just that in recent years. Since I’ve been teaching the one day class on Functional Gait Analysis, which I now like to call Biomechanics Made Easy, it has been my intention to make the understanding of prescribing and dispensing functional foot orthoses much easier plus more fun and rewarding. I know the way I was taught biomechanics in Podiatry school was very confusing and there is a lot of misconceptions and conflicting information which just adds to the confusion. Roberta Nole, who invented the QUADRASTEP SYSTEM® and foot typing algorithym, is a modern day genius in my opinion.