Your Back Hurts? Your Feet May Be the Problem

As a doctor and a mother of five kids, I spend an awful lot of time on my feet. And even though I’m only 34, until recently, my back hurt pretty much all the time. 

I assumed it was the predictable cost of my life: the lifting, the call nights, the pregnancies . I certainly didn’t think my shoes had anything to do with it.

Then I met a patient who had spent years in the Marine Corps, hiking with a hundred-pound pack on his back. His spine was “completely destroyed,” he said. He had done what we doctors usually tell people to do. Eventually, desperate, he went looking on his own.

What ultimately helped him was not another procedure, but learning how to stand, walk, and run differently. 

My patient realized that his posture, his stride, and especially his shoes were all part of the same problem. He changed the way he moved and what he wore on his feet, slowly working to rebuild the architecture of the part of his body that has most contact with the ground. 

His back pain receded to the background of his life.

I’m a physician, trained at good institutions, steeped in evidence-based practice. And yet, through all those years of medical training, no one ever taught me to think about how people walk—or what they wear on their feet—as a legitimate medical variable

Charlotte Grinberg, MD The Free Press 3 March 2026

https://www.thefp.com/p/your-back-hurts-your-feet-may-be