The New York Times Health section often carries interesting and somewhat controversial articles, like this week’s article about orthotics. Orthotics are very common, but are they helping? The tone of the article is that they do not, although the specifics are that they do but they’re not sure why.

Take a read, but remember that often articles of this nature do gloss over some important facts while over-emphasizing less important ones to prove a point:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/health/nutrition/18best.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=health

If you only want to skim, skip ahead to page 2 where they discuss the orthotic study they did with 240 Canadian soldiers (yes, we have more than 240 soldiers).

It would have been great if they had included a third group in the study that did single-leg barefoot strength training to try to improve their foot and ankle strength.