Custom Orthotics in Singapore: Who Actually Designs and Makes Your Orthotics?
17 September 2026
By Mark Reyneker, BTech (Podiatry), MSc (Palaeontology), Registered Podiatrist, Foot & Gait Specialist | Founder & Clinical Director, Family Podiatry Centre
Published: 17 September 2026 | Last reviewed: 17 September 2026
A truly custom foot orthotic is not simply an insole made from a 3D scan of your foot. The scan provides the starting shape, but a clinician must decide how that shape should be modified according to your examination, diagnosis, biomechanics, symptoms and footwear.
A truly custom foot orthotic is not simply an insole made from a 3D scan of your foot. The scan provides the starting shape, but a clinician must decide how that shape should be modified according to your examination, diagnosis, biomechanics, symptoms and footwear.
The crucial step is who converts that clinical prescription into the actual three-dimensional orthotic design.
At Family Podiatry Centre, the podiatrist who examines and prescribes the orthotic also creates the patient's individual CAD design. The completed digital design is then passed to our laboratory for computer-aided manufacturing and finishing. This helps preserve prescription integrity because the laboratory does not have to interpret what the podiatrist intended—the clinical prescription has already been converted into the digital geometry that will be manufactured. Research has identified prescription terminology, communication between clinicians and manufacturers, variability in custom orthoses and confidence in orthotic design as important issues in custom foot-orthosis provision (Leach, Cowley and Bowen, 2024).
Where Are Your Custom Orthotics Actually Made? Why Prescription Integrity Matters
When a patient is prescribed a pair of custom foot orthoses, there is one question almost nobody asks:
Who actually makes them?
Most patients naturally assume that the podiatrist who examined their feet somehow makes the orthotics as well.
In reality, that is often not what happens.
A podiatrist may examine the patient, perform a biomechanical assessment, take a cast or 3D scan and write an orthotic prescription. That information may then be sent to an external orthotics laboratory—sometimes hundreds or thousands of kilometres away—where somebody else interprets the prescription, creates the digital design and manufactures the device.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this model. Excellent orthotic laboratories exist around the world. But it creates an important question that deserves considerably more attention:
How much control does the podiatrist retain over the prescription after it leaves the consultation room?
After more than two decades working with foot orthoses, I believe this question is at least as important as asking what material the orthotic is made from or what type of scanner was used. Because a custom orthotic is not simply the shape of your foot. It is a prescription translated into a three-dimensional medical device. And every step between the examination and the finished orthotic matters.
Why does the orthotic laboratory matter?
A custom foot orthosis involves much more than scanning the foot. The clinician must decide how the orthosis should be shaped, where it should support or unload the foot, how stiff it should be, which structures should be accommodated and how various corrections should interact with the patient's individual anatomy and footwear.
Research confirms that custom foot orthosis prescriptions can contain numerous interacting variables including rearfoot and forefoot correction, arch fill, shell modifications, accommodations, shell material, posting and cover design (Menz et al., 2017).
Once those decisions have been made, somebody has to convert the clinical prescription into the actual geometry of the orthotic. That is where communication between clinician and manufacturer becomes critically important. A 2024 UK study of specialist musculoskeletal podiatrists identified concerns including prescription terminology, communication with manufacturers, confidence in design and manufacture, variability between finished orthoses and the need for improved education in custom orthotic provision (Leach, Cowley and Bowen, 2024).
At Family Podiatry Centre, we deliberately take a different approach.
The podiatrist who examines the patient and writes the prescription is also responsible for creating that patient's orthotic digitally in CAD.
The laboratory receives an already completed and protected digital design.
Its job is then to manufacture that design using CAM and perform the finishing processes.
That difference is fundamental.
The experience that changed the way I thought about orthotics
My concern about this subject started long before CAD/CAM orthotics became commonplace. I was still a podiatrist in my twenties when I became aware of something that made a lasting impression on me. A laboratory was accepting orders from podiatrists for what clinicians understood to be customised orthoses. However, I discovered that at least some devices were being made by selecting an existing prefabricated shell that approximately matched the required size and then adding the requested pads and modifications to it. From the outside, the finished orthotic looked convincing. It had the expected shape. It had the requested additions. It looked like a custom orthotic.
But the underlying shell had not necessarily been individually manufactured from the patient's prescription in the way I had assumed.
I also became aware of another laboratory that would sometimes contact clinicians and ask them to alter prescriptions according to the materials that the laboratory had available. There may, of course, be perfectly legitimate circumstances in which a laboratory discusses an alternative material with a clinician. But it made me think very carefully about the direction in which that decision should flow.
It should be:
clinical requirement → prescription → appropriate material
rather than:
available material → altered prescription.
Those experiences frightened me as a young clinician. They also taught me something that has remained with me throughout my career:
once a prescription leaves your hands, you need to know exactly what happens to it.
When I eventually established my own private practice, I decided from the beginning that I wanted control over our orthotic manufacturing process. It was not primarily about speed. It was about prescription integrity.
A custom orthotic is not simply a scan of your foot
Modern scanners can create extraordinarily detailed representations of the foot. But a scan is only anatomical data. It does not decide the treatment.
Consider a patient with heel pain, first metatarsophalangeal joint pathology, forefoot overload, asymmetrical pronation or a structural difference between the two feet. The scan tells us what the foot looks like. It does not automatically tell us what the orthotic should look like. The clinician must decide how the orthotic geometry should differ from the patient's natural foot shape in order to achieve a particular therapeutic objective.
A custom prescription may involve variables such as:
- shell thickness and stiffness
- heel-cup depth
- arch contour
- rearfoot correction
- forefoot correction
- intrinsic or extrinsic posting
- heel skives
- first-ray or plantar fascial accommodations
- metatarsal modifications
- localised offloading
- shell width and length
- material selection
- cover thickness and density.
An analysis of 1,000 custom orthotic prescriptions from 178 practices demonstrated just how variable and complex these prescriptions can be, with combinations involving orthosis type, cast correction, arch-fill technique, shell modification, material and cover design (Menz et al., 2017).
The scan is therefore the beginning of the process. The design is the prescription made physical.
The overlooked person in the process: who actually creates the CAD design?
This is where modern orthotics becomes particularly interesting. People often use the term CAD/CAM as though it represents a single automated process. It does not. CAD means computer-aided design. CAM means computer-aided manufacturing. Those are two different steps.
CAD determines what the orthotic will be. CAM manufactures what has already been designed. The distinction matters enormously.
A large 2025 study examining CAD/CAM foot-orthosis provision across UK NHS orthotic services received usable data from 131 NHS Trusts and Health Boards. Approximately 70.5% of the services providing bespoke insoles used CAD/CAM.
Yet in the most common workflow, the digital modelling or rectification was performed by a technician in 73.6% of services using CAD/CAM. The study also found that physical impressions were frequently transported to another location before digital processing. (Barr, Richards and Chapman, 2025).
That does not mean technician-designed orthoses are necessarily poor. Experienced orthotic technicians can be extraordinarily skilled. But it illustrates how easily the person who examines the patient and the person who creates the final three-dimensional geometry can become separated.
At Family Podiatry Centre we deliberately remove that separation.
Our podiatrists do the CAD themselves
Our process is different.
The podiatrist examines the patient.
The podiatrist determines the diagnosis and treatment objectives.
The podiatrist writes the prescription.
And critically:
the same podiatrist personally converts that prescription into the patient's three-dimensional CAD orthotic design.
Only after that design has been completed is the protected CAD file passed into the manufacturing stage.
The laboratory then performs CAM and the finishing processes—manufacturing the shell and completing elements such as covers and finishing.
In simplified form:
Patient examination
↓
Clinical diagnosis
↓
Orthotic prescription
↓
CAD design by the treating podiatrist
↓
Protected digital design
↓
CAM manufacturing
↓
Finishing and cover
↓
Patient fitting and review
↓
Clinical diagnosis
↓
Orthotic prescription
↓
CAD design by the treating podiatrist
↓
Protected digital design
↓
CAM manufacturing
↓
Finishing and cover
↓
Patient fitting and review
This architecture solves one of the most difficult problems in outsourced orthotic manufacturing:
the prescription no longer needs to be interpreted by another person before the shell is created.
The clinical decisions have already been converted into geometry.
Why removing one communication step matters
Communication sounds trivial until you consider how small some orthotic modifications actually are. In the 2024 UK focus-group study, specialist podiatrists specifically described difficulties translating prescription terminology between clinician and manufacturer.
One clinician memorably described how apparently identical angular instructions could mean slightly different things to different people. Participants reported that establishing a good working relationship with manufacturers reduced the need for subsequent modifications.
This is exactly the type of problem our system is designed to avoid.
If I decide how a shell should be modified and then personally make that modification digitally, there is no second individual trying to interpret what I meant.
The laboratory does not have to ask:
“What did the podiatrist mean by this?”
The geometry already exists.
Its responsibility becomes:
“Did we manufacture this approved geometry accurately?”
Those are fundamentally different quality-control problems.
The laboratory can still make a mistake—but it cannot redesign the prescription
It is important not to overstate this. No manufacturing process is immune to error. CAM-related mistakes remain possible.
The wrong material could theoretically be selected. A machining or calibration problem could occur. A shell could be damaged during finishing. A cover or pad could be applied incorrectly. Quality control therefore remains essential. But these are manufacturing fidelity errors. They are different from prescription interpretation errors.
Once our podiatrist has completed and protected the CAD geometry, the laboratory is not being asked to decide what the clinical prescription means.
It is being asked to manufacture an already-defined design.
I think of this as three separate levels of control:
1. Prescription integrity
The clinician decides what the patient requires.
2. Design integrity
The clinician personally translates that prescription into digital geometry.
3. Manufacturing fidelity
The laboratory must reproduce that approved geometry accurately.
Keeping those three concepts separate is important.
Why you cannot simply inspect an orthotic afterwards and know whether the prescription was followed
There is another problem with custom orthotics that is rarely discussed.
You cannot read an orthotic prescription simply by looking at the finished orthotic.
Think about prescription glasses. If an optometrist prescribes a spectacle lens, the finished lens can be placed into a lensmeter and its optical characteristics measured. The prescription can be objectively checked. Custom orthotics do not work like that.
Certainly, there are things an experienced clinician can identify visually. We can see whether a metatarsal pad is present. We can assess approximately where it has been placed. We can see a first-ray cut-out. We can examine heel-cup depth. We can identify obvious posting or accommodations. We can measure certain gross dimensions. But many prescription variables are extremely subtle. Some involve only a few degrees. Others involve only a few millimetres. The final three-dimensional surface may represent several interacting modifications.
Research by Telfer and colleagues demonstrated that even the processes used to obtain foot shape and subsequently create the orthotic in CAD can introduce measurable variability. Importantly, they concluded that looking only at basic linear and angular measurements may fail to capture the full variability present in an orthotic design (Telfer et al., 2012). That is an important point.
There is no routine clinical equivalent of a lensmeter for custom orthotics
Sophisticated metrology certainly exists. A finished orthotic can be 3D scanned. Surface geometry can be digitally analysed. Researchers can compare shapes, angles, volumes and deviation maps. But that is not the same thing as placing the orthotic into a simple machine and having it display:
rearfoot correction: X°
forefoot correction: Y°
heel skive: Z mm
arch fill: X mm
forefoot correction: Y°
heel skive: Z mm
arch fill: X mm
Many prescription parameters describe not merely the final external dimensions but how the original foot geometry was modified to produce that shape. To reconstruct those decisions from the finished shell, you would need appropriate reference geometry and knowledge of how the original model had been modified. In routine clinical practice there is no simple equivalent of the spectacle lensmeter that reverse-reads the complete original custom orthotic prescription from the finished device.
That creates an important limitation in conventional outsourced quality control. A podiatrist may receive an orthotic back from a laboratory. It may look good. It may have the requested cover. The correct pad appears to be present. The overall contour looks plausible. But visual inspection alone cannot necessarily confirm every degree or millimetre encoded in the original prescription. This is one reason my early experience with laboratories affected me so strongly.
Something can look like a custom orthotic without allowing the clinician to reconstruct exactly how it was made.
Digital design changes that equation
This is where CAD becomes extraordinarily valuable—provided the clinician controls it. Instead of attempting to reverse-engineer the prescription from a finished shell afterwards, we maintain the digital design that existed before manufacturing. That digital model becomes the reference. The prescription and design are therefore connected before the orthotic enters the manufacturing process.
This is one of the reasons I believe CAD/CAM represents such an important advance in orthotic medicine.But only if we remember that CAD/CAM itself does not guarantee quality. Research demonstrates that CAD operators can introduce variability during the design process. In Telfer et al.'s study, the more experienced CAD operator achieved good-to-excellent reproducibility across most variables, while the authors concluded that additional variability could be introduced during CAD design and that operator experience was important (Telfer et al., 2012).
In other words:
The computer does not understand the patient's pathology.
The computer does not understand the patient's pathology.
The operator does. This raises an uncomfortable question about podiatry education. There is another part of this story that deserves discussion.
When I trained, understanding orthotic manufacture was considered part of understanding orthotic therapy.
Traditionally, podiatry students did not simply learn that an orthotic could be prescribed. They learned how a prescription ultimately became a physical object.
That meant understanding casting, positive models, corrections, shell materials, heating, vacuum forming, grinding, posting, accommodations, padding and finishing. To people outside podiatry, that might sound unusual. Why should a healthcare professional who spends most of the day examining and treating patients need to know how to manufacture something in a workshop?
My answer is simple:
because making an orthotic teaches you what an orthotic prescription actually means.
If you have physically manufactured orthoses, terms such as shell thickness, arch fill, heel skive, forefoot correction or rearfoot post are not simply boxes on an order form.
You understand how those decisions physically change a device.
You understand what happens when the shell is ground.
You understand the consequences of increasing or reducing stiffness.
You understand how several modifications interact.
You understand that a few millimetres can matter.
And you understand when a prescription may be difficult or impossible to manufacture in the way it has been written.
Has podiatry education changed?
We need to be careful here because podiatry education is not identical between universities. Some universities still place substantial emphasis on orthotic manufacturing.
For example, the University of Brighton currently maintains an orthotics manufacturing facility and states that podiatry students produce orthotics and insoles for patients as part of their practical training.
However, modern UK professional standards illustrate how minimum expectations have evolved. The current Health and Care Professions Council standards require newly registered podiatrists to be able to prescribe foot orthoses and to make and use chair-side foot orthoses.
They do not explicitly require every graduate to manufacture a complete custom laboratory orthosis from cast or scan through to the finished device.
That distinction is interesting.
And recent research suggests that clinicians themselves recognise an educational issue. Leach, Cowley and Bowen's 2024 study found lack of confidence in custom orthosis design and manufacture among the themes raised by specialist podiatrists. Participants specifically called for greater education at registration level so that newly qualified podiatrists have greater knowledge of custom orthotic design and manufacture. I therefore would not argue that modern podiatrists are universally poorly trained in orthotics. That would be unfair. But I do think something valuable can be lost when manufacture becomes completely separated from clinical education.
Outsourcing and education may have evolved together
It is tempting to say that the rise of large commercial orthotic laboratories directly caused universities to reduce manufacturing education. The research does not prove that causal relationship, so I would not make that claim. But the professions have undoubtedly evolved alongside technological and commercial changes in orthotic manufacture.
In clinical practice, it has become increasingly easy to:
scan a foot → complete an order form → send the data away → receive an orthotic.
And once that becomes the dominant workflow, there is naturally less practical need for every clinician to maintain a traditional manufacturing laboratory.
The danger is that the efficiency of outsourcing can eventually separate the clinician from an important body of knowledge. A 2016 UK qualitative study found that orthotic practice varied considerably between clinicians and was shaped by a complex combination of undergraduate education, subsequent clinical experience, local working environment and trial-and-error learning (Williams et al., 2016).
A 2018 international survey involving 264 podiatrists also demonstrated significant differences in orthotic prescribing behaviour between countries. UK respondents prescribed more prefabricated devices than customised devices, whereas Australian respondents prescribed proportionally more custom orthoses. The authors cautioned that healthcare setting and other factors could contribute to these differences; they did not attribute them simply to education. (Chapman et al., 2018). The picture is therefore complicated.
But there is enough evidence to say that orthotic practice and training are variable—and that experienced podiatrists themselves have called for greater education in custom orthotic design and manufacture.
I believe you should understand how to make an orthotic even if you never make one yourself
This is ultimately my professional view rather than a conclusion from a clinical trial.
I believe a podiatrist prescribing sophisticated custom orthoses should understand how those orthoses are made.
That does not mean every podiatrist needs to spend their career standing beside a grinder. Technology has moved on. CAD/CAM is cleaner, more reproducible, more scalable and potentially far more powerful than traditional manufacturing.But the knowledge should not disappear simply because the manufacturing method changed.
In fact, modern CAD gives us an extraordinary opportunity.
Instead of removing the podiatrist from manufacturing, we can use technology to bring the podiatrist back into the design process.
That is exactly what we have chosen to do.
Clinician-controlled CAD: combining old knowledge with modern technology
Our model is not an attempt to return to the era of plaster everywhere, ovens and manual grinders. It is the opposite.
We want to retain the clinical understanding that came from traditional orthotic manufacture while using modern digital tools to obtain greater control. The treating podiatrist can examine the patient's scan and personally manipulate the digital model. The prescription therefore stops being merely written instructions. It becomes an actual three-dimensional design.
Once approved, that design becomes the manufacturing file. The laboratory no longer has to translate clinical language into geometry. That translation has already been performed by the clinician. This is where I believe CAD/CAM can fundamentally improve the relationship between orthotic prescription and manufacture.
Research shows why the clinician–fabricator feedback loop matters
Orthotic manufacture has traditionally involved two feedback loops.
One exists between patient and clinician.
The patient tries the orthosis and reports whether their symptoms improve.
The clinician assesses the response.
The second loop exists between clinician and fabricator.
If something needs changing, information travels back to the person manufacturing the device.
Qaiser, Faraz and Johnson described these iterative patient–clinician and clinician–fabricator loops as a feature of custom orthosis prescription and noted that they can contribute to delays and problems with repeatability. Their proposed digital approach sought specifically to improve communication, reduce iterations and archive design data (Qaiser, Faraz and Johnson, 2020).
This is an important conceptual point. Every additional interpretation stage is another place where information must be transferred accurately. Our approach compresses one of those loops. The treating podiatrist performs the CAD.
Local manufacture also shortens the physical feedback loop
There is another, more obvious advantage to keeping manufacturing close to the clinician: time. A particularly relevant example comes from Singapore.
In 2025, a Singapore public-hospital programme reported that pressure-relieving insoles used for patients with diabetes had previously been produced overseas and could take up to two months to reach patients. Further adjustments could add delays because devices might need to be shipped back and forth.
After moving to a local digital 3D-printing pathway, the hospital reported reducing delivery to approximately one week. It is important to interpret that correctly.
These were specialised pressure-relieving insoles for diabetic foot management, not necessarily the same type of functional custom orthoses used in routine podiatric practice.
And the example does not prove that every locally manufactured orthotic is clinically better than an overseas-manufactured one. What it demonstrates very clearly is that geographical separation can lengthen the manufacturing and adjustment loop.
When a modification requires international shipping, even a small change can become a logistical process.
Does outsourcing automatically mean poor quality?
Absolutely not.
There are excellent orthotic laboratories abroad. Some have sophisticated equipment, highly experienced technicians and excellent quality-control systems. Likewise, an orthotic manufactured locally is not automatically good simply because it was manufactured nearby.
Geography is not quality control.
Our argument is therefore not:
local = good
overseas = bad
overseas = bad
It is:
the more directly the prescribing clinician controls and can verify the chain from prescription to design to manufacture, the fewer opportunities there are for the clinical intention to be altered or misunderstood.
That is a very different argument.
Nor does “3D printed” automatically mean better
The same caution applies to technology.
Patients increasingly encounter terms such as:
3D scanned
3D printed
AI-designed
computer-generated
These phrases sound impressive.
But technology does not determine whether an orthotic prescription is appropriate. A beautifully manufactured orthotic based on a poor clinical prescription remains a poor prescription.
A highly accurate 3D printer can reproduce the wrong geometry extremely accurately.
The clinician still needs to understand:
- anatomy
- pathology
- biomechanics
- tissue loading
- footwear
- materials
- orthotic design
- patient tolerance
- treatment objectives.
Technology should improve the clinician's ability to express those decisions. It should not replace them.
Why “custom” deserves closer scrutiny
There is also a broader question here. What exactly does custom mean?
A device can be individualised in many different ways. At one extreme is an off-the-shelf insole supplied in standard shoe sizes.
It may then be modified using pads, wedges or covers. That can be an entirely appropriate treatment and, in many situations, it may be all the patient requires.
But that is different from creating an individual orthotic shell from a patient's morphology and clinical prescription.
Neither approach should masquerade as the other. Patients should know what they are receiving.
The word custom should describe a process, not simply a marketing term.
The three questions I think patients should ask
Patients frequently ask:
“How much do the orthotics cost?”
“How long will they last?”
“Can I wear them in different shoes?”
Those are reasonable questions.
But I think three additional questions are equally important:
Who designs my orthotic?
Not simply who scans the foot.
Who actually creates the three-dimensional orthotic geometry?
Who manufactures it?
Is it made locally, within the clinic, by an external domestic laboratory or overseas?
Can my podiatrist see and control the design?
That may be the most important question of all.
How we approach custom orthotics at Family Podiatry Centre
Our approach developed from the experiences I had early in my career and from a very simple principle:
If we prescribe it, we should understand exactly what we are asking the orthotic to do.
If we prescribe it, we should understand exactly what we are asking the orthotic to do.
And if we are going to call it custom, we should know how that customisation was created.
For that reason, our podiatrists do more than examine the patient and send a scan to someone else.
The podiatrist who prescribes the orthotic also performs the CAD design.
That means the person looking at the three-dimensional model is the same person who examined the patient's joints, watched them walk, palpated the painful structures, looked at their footwear and decided what treatment was required. The completed digital design then goes to our laboratory for CAM manufacturing and finishing. That distinction is central to our system.
The laboratory manufactures the prescription. It does not decide the prescription.
This is why our laboratory has always mattered to me
When I established my practice, having control of our orthotic laboratory was not an afterthought.It came directly from what I had seen as a young podiatrist. I did not want to prescribe something and then simply hope that what returned was what I had intended.
Over the years the manufacturing technology has changed enormously. Plaster has increasingly given way to scanning. Manual model modification has moved into CAD. Manufacturing has become increasingly computer controlled. But my underlying philosophy has not changed.
The clinician should remain as close as possible to the prescription.
If anything, modern digital technology now allows us to achieve that more effectively than before.
What does the research actually prove?
This is an important distinction.There is currently no clinical trial demonstrating that an otherwise identical orthotic produces a better patient outcome simply because it was manufactured in the same building—or even the same country—as the prescribing podiatrist. That would be an inappropriate claim.
Instead, the evidence supports the individual components of the argument.
We know that custom foot orthotic prescriptions contain numerous interacting variables.
We know that foot-shape capture and CAD design can introduce variability and that CAD operator experience influences reproducibility.
We know that specialist podiatrists have identified manufacturer communication, prescription terminology, variability in finished devices and education as problems within custom orthotic provision.
We know that foot-shape capture and CAD design can introduce variability and that CAD operator experience influences reproducibility.
We know that specialist podiatrists have identified manufacturer communication, prescription terminology, variability in finished devices and education as problems within custom orthotic provision.
We know that modern orthotic systems frequently separate the clinician from the person carrying out CAD modelling; in one UK NHS study, technicians performed the modelling in nearly three-quarters of CAD/CAM services surveyed.
We know that orthotic prescription and fabrication involve iterative communication between patient, clinician and manufacturer.
And we have a Singapore example demonstrating that bringing a digital manufacturing pathway closer to the clinical service can dramatically shorten turnaround and modification time.
None of these findings proves that every outsourced orthotic is inferior.
Together, however, they make a compelling case for shortening and controlling the chain between clinical prescription and physical manufacture.
The real question is not “local or overseas?”
After examining this subject, I think that question is actually too simplistic.
The more important question is:
Who controls the prescription after it leaves the consultation room?
If the answer is that the treating clinician remains involved through prescription, CAD design, manufacturing records, fitting and adjustment, then there is a continuous clinical thread running through the process.
That is the system we have deliberately tried to build.
The orthotic is not simply ordered.
It is designed.
The design is not delegated to someone who has never examined the patient.The person who makes the clinical decisions is the person who creates the digital geometry representing those decisions.
The laboratory then manufactures that geometry. That may sound like a subtle difference. I believe it is one of the most important differences in the way a custom orthotic can be made. Because ultimately the value of a custom orthotic does not come from the scanner. It does not come from the CNC machine. It does not come from the 3D printer.
And it certainly does not come from the word custom printed on an invoice.
It comes from maintaining the integrity of a clinical idea all the way from the patient's foot to the device that eventually goes back underneath it.
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Disclaimer: The word "treatment" in this article refers to the care and management of a patient’s health to prevent, cure, or improve a condition. Treatment results vary and do not necessarily indicate a cure. This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.
About the Author
Mark B. Reyneker, BTech (Podiatry), MSc (Palaeontology) is a podiatrist and Founder & Clinical Director of Family Podiatry Centre, with more than 25 years of clinical experience across South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore. His clinical interests include foot and lower-limb pain, gait and biomechanics, sports-related foot conditions, orthotic therapy and footwear.
Alongside his clinical practice, Mark conducts research into human gait and foot biomechanics. His MSc research at the University of the Witwatersrand investigated human propulsion and the structural properties of the metatarsals. He is also the inventor of A Foot Orthotic, an orthotic technology developed through an international patent family.
Book An Appointment
Disclaimer: The word "treatment" in this article refers to the care and management of a patient’s health to prevent, cure, or improve a condition. Treatment results vary and do not necessarily indicate a cure. This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.
About the Author
Mark B. Reyneker, BTech (Podiatry), MSc (Palaeontology) is a podiatrist and Founder & Clinical Director of Family Podiatry Centre, with more than 25 years of clinical experience across South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore. His clinical interests include foot and lower-limb pain, gait and biomechanics, sports-related foot conditions, orthotic therapy and footwear.
Alongside his clinical practice, Mark conducts research into human gait and foot biomechanics. His MSc research at the University of the Witwatersrand investigated human propulsion and the structural properties of the metatarsals. He is also the inventor of A Foot Orthotic, an orthotic technology developed through an international patent family.
References
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2. Chapman, L.S., Redmond, A.C., Landorf, K.B. et al. (2018). ‘A survey of foot orthoses prescription habits amongst podiatrists in the UK, Australia and New Zealand’. Journal of Foot and Ankle Research, 11, 64. doi: 10.1186/s13047-018-0304-z. Full article
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5. Menz, H.B., Allan, J.J., Bonanno, D.R., Landorf, K.B. and Murley, G.S. (2017). ‘Custom-made foot orthoses: an analysis of prescription characteristics from an Australian commercial orthotic laboratory’. Journal of Foot and Ankle Research, 10, 23. doi: 10.1186/s13047-017-0204-7. Full article
6. Qaiser, Z., Faraz, A. and Johnson, S. (2020). ‘Feasibility Study of a Rapid Evaluate and Adjust Device (READ) for Custom Foot Orthoses Prescription’. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 28(8), pp. 1760–1770. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2020.3007668. PubMed record
7. Sengkang General Hospital/SingHealth (2025). ‘3D-Printed Custom Insoles: Advancing Diabetic Foot Care at Sengkang General Hospital’, 8 July 2025. SingHealth article
Telfer, S., Gibson, K.S., Hennessy, K., Steultjens, M.P. and Woodburn, J. (2012). ‘Computer-aided design of customized foot orthoses: reproducibility and effect of method used to obtain foot shape’. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 93(5), pp. 863–870. doi: 10.1016/j.apmr.2011.12.019. PubMed record
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9. Williams, A.E., Martinez-Santos, A., McAdam, J. and Nester, C.J. (2016). ‘“Trial and error…”, “…happy patients” and “…an old toy in the cupboard”: a qualitative investigation of factors that influence practitioners in their prescription of foot orthoses’. Journal of Foot and Ankle Research, 9, 11. doi: 10.1186/s13047-016-0142-9. Open-access full article
