I seem to be writing a number of short sharp cynical posts lately and this may or may not be another one of the those. Because of my work, you get a lot of targeted advertising on Facebook and other social media sites based on websites I may have visited or posts that I engaged with. Obviously, a lot of stuff targeted at those with foot problems are going to show up to me. Some of that stuff is really bad and I have to try really hard to bite my tongue and not respond. I do have a habit of trolling flat earthers and pseudoscience peddlers but have leant from experience that if you troll those selling crap products, they just delete your post, so I think better of it.
Lately, I have had a flurry of promotional adverts turn up for these “bunion correctors”. I used to never think much of them. You are supposed to wear them at night and they are supposed to correct the angle of the hallux valgus. My opinion was always that during the day you have the force of the shoes and the force of the biomechanics creating the bunion or hallux valgus is way greater than the force that these bunion splints can provide during the night. That was my somewhat cynical view, so I did not put a lot of faith in them. But, they have been used for over 100 years and something that has been used for that long has to be good … right? You still do see a lot of people asking about them online.
But like any good clinician, you should stick to the evidence. And there is a study showing that they can correct the angle by a few degrees after a months use, so it does look like they may be able to help a bit. I probably should revise my opinion of them.
What I will not be doing is revising my opinion of some of the clowns that try to sell them and their before and after photos. Follow this series of photos that I screen captured of a website trying to sell them:
Its does not take a rocket scientist to notice that the before photo is the left foot and the after photo is the right foot and the shoe on the ground tells us that the photos were taken on the same day. And these photos were being used to tell us how great the bunion correctors were and to sell them. They must be pretty stupid to think people are that blind.