How this site is written

Editorial Policy

Who writes Heel Guide, what evidence a claim has to rest on, when a product may be recommended, and what happens when we get something wrong.

Who writes this

Heel Guide is written and reviewed by Dr. Tom Biernacki, DPM, FACFAS, a double board-certified foot and ankle surgeon in private practice in Michigan. Every page that makes a clinical claim carries his review. Where a page is written with research assistance, the clinical content is still his responsibility, and he is the one who signs it off.

What a clinical claim has to rest on

In order of preference:

  1. Clinical practice guidelines from the specialty bodies — the orthopaedic and physical therapy societies that publish graded recommendations for heel pain.
  2. Systematic reviews and randomised trials, read for effect size and for who was actually in the study, not just for the headline conclusion.
  3. Individual studies and case series, clearly flagged as limited.
  4. Clinical experience, and when that is what a statement rests on, the page says so in those words.

Where the honest answer is that the evidence is thin or conflicting, the page says that instead of picking a side for the sake of a clean sentence. Heel pain has several treatments in wide use whose evidence is genuinely mixed, and readers are better served knowing which ones those are.

What we will not publish

  • A cure claim for a condition that does not have a cure.
  • A timeline presented as a promise. “Most people improve within X months” is a population statistic, not a prediction about you, and it will always be written that way here.
  • A statistic without a traceable source.
  • Fabricated testing. If a product was not physically assessed, the page will not imply that it was.
  • Invented patient stories or testimonials.
  • Anything that would delay somebody seeking care for a problem that needs to be seen.

Product recommendations

Heel Guide earns affiliate commission — see the affiliate disclosure. A product may only be named as a recommendation when all three of these hold:

  1. A mechanism. There is a specific, statable reason the product’s design addresses the problem the page is about.
  2. An exclusion. The page names who should not use it. Compression, rigid inserts, night splints and walking boots all have people they are wrong for.
  3. An honest provenance label. Assessed in clinic, assessed personally, or reasoned from specifications — stated plainly, never blurred.

Until a page can meet that bar, it ships with no named picks. You will see pages on this site that describe exactly what to look for in a product and name nothing. That is deliberate, and it is not an oversight.

This is education, not medical care

Reading a website is not being examined. Heel pain has a short list of causes that look alike from the outside and a shorter list that are dangerous to miss — a calcaneal stress fracture, an infected heel, a ruptured tendon, an inflammatory arthritis presenting at the heel. No article can tell those apart on your foot. Heel Guide exists to help you understand what your clinician is talking about and to ask better questions, not to replace the examination.

Get seen promptly, not eventually, if you have heel pain with fever or spreading redness, cannot put weight on the foot, felt a sudden pop, have numbness or a wound that is not healing, or have diabetes or a circulation problem and any new heel symptom at all.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Substantive corrections are made on the page itself rather than quietly overwritten, and pages carry a review date so you can see how current they are. Reach Dr. Biernacki through Balance Foot & Ankle.

How pages are kept current

Clinical pages are reviewed at least annually, and sooner when a relevant guideline is revised or a significant trial publishes. The review date on a page is the date a clinician actually re-read it, not the date a plugin last touched the file.