Seriously? Funny Shoes For Back Pain, Sour Cherries For Insomnia, And A New Qaly Currency

Image created by the author using Designer to make himself look, well, you decide …

If Oscar Wilde were still alive today, he’d probably disown his famous essay “The Decay of Lying — An Observation”. Today, there is no observable decay of this oldest human trait. Quite the opposite. Lying has blossomed into an art form that makes the otherwise dry medical research an entertaining plot to watch. One of those is:

That Funny Shoe Thing

Free yourself from “knee osteoarthritis, chronic hip pain, and non-specific back pain” by simply walking half an hour every day for a year with two curved pods under your soles. That’s in a nutshell what AposHealth, the Israel-based provider of “Precision Medicine for Musculoskeletal Conditions”, touts on its website.

I wouldn’t have noticed it had it not been for an uncritical article on Medscape about a study in support of this claim [1] presented at the World Congress on Osteoarthritis.

Screenshot taken by the author

While musculoskeletal conditions aren’t exactly up my professional alley, methodical skepticism is.

Articles about back pain trigger a teeth-clenching recall of two slipped lumbar…