I posted in the May 28 Thursday daily a note discussing a medical review article that concluded there does not exist any clinical research on running shoes and injury rates. This has lead me to wonder if anybody here has any ideas on how to convince the National Institute of Health or other independent institution to fund a study on this topic. It seems to me that relative to most medical research this would be rather inexpensive. What we need is evidence that shows one way or the other if any particular shoe type helps to reduce or raise injury rates in people with particular foot types. This seems to me to be a well defined problem: we want to know if there is any reason to pair under, normal or overpronators with neutral, stability, or motion control shoes. Conducting this as a double blind study should be easy. Now how to get funding so that medical scientists will write proposals to conduct it?
Anybody that wants a copy of the study can write me at twocat74 at gmail dot com and I will send you the PDF.
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I think that's a great idea! I'm pretty sure it was my Asics 21XX that caused me a lot of problems with my arch and ankle. As soon as I switched into different shoes, I had no more problems. I don't know anything about funding research, though. The shoe companies might not be too excited about the idea!
To be honest, I'm a skeptic of the whole running shoe industry. Ever since the anti-sweatshop campaigns back in the 90s began revealing how little of a running shoes' cost was attributable to R&D and actual production (and how much went to pay for advertising and big-name sponsorship) it's been clear just how much the shoe industry is one based on image more than substance. (There are other studies out there too, questioning assumptions about running shoes--far from definitive but suggestive, for example:
http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20071010/running-shoes-dont-pay-more?src=RSS_PUBLIC
So the lack of research supporting their many claims doesn't surprise me.
If you're serious about this, you might try contacting the authors of the study (and similar skeptical studies) to see if (a) they have contacts in the US who are interested in such issues and (b) if they have suggestions on how to advance your idea with a giant bureaucracy like the NIH.
If you do pursue this, definitely keep us informed. It might be that the power of the Internet (and consumer self-interest) could be harnessed if necessary.
Good luck.
BTW, I assume you've seen this, which was circulating in the main forum awhile back:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-painful-truth-trainers-Are-expensive-running-shoes-waste-money.html
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