Expert Testimonial – Professor Oliver Pearce

“By way of explanation, “APOS,” if any of you were wondering, is All Phase Of Stance. It’s a treatment for various joint disorders, particularly the knee. I happen to be a consultant orthopaedic surgeon specializing in hip and knee surgery. The knee is more relevant here.

“It works by changing the way you walk at a very simplistic level, changing the way you take the weight through your knee on a day-to-day basis. Even if you happen not to be wearing the shoes at the time, it takes the pain and force away from the painful bit to the non-painful bit. This gives you either a pain-free or significantly less painful knee.

“I’ve identified a subgroup, a portion of my patients who come to see me, who just aren’t successfully treated to their satisfaction, to my satisfaction, by the traditional treatments. These patients have early degenerative changes. They’ve had keyhole surgery for a degenerative meniscal tear. They’ve had a steroid injection. They’ve had physiotherapy. They’ve lost weight if it was relevant to them. And, in one way or another, although they may have improved, they haven’t improved enough to do what they want in life. There always seems to be something missing in this “gray area.” This “gray area” lies between traditional treatments, early arthritis, and being bad enough to warrant a full knee replacement and can last quite a long time.

“Traditionally, as surgeons, we’ve been advising patients to adapt or modify their lifestyle around their painful knee. This usually means stopping golf, tennis, or long-distance dog walking, and that’s not really satisfactory. We haven’t had something else to offer in the gray area. Apos® is an alternative that I have used with success for patients in exactly this situation.

“The first person I ever referred for Apos® was someone I’d treated for quite a while. He had an osteochondral defect of his medial femoral condyle—in plain English, the knuckle on the end of his thigh bone, so where you bear your weight through your knee, had a pothole in the surface cartilage. And treatments ran from keyhole surgery to debride it, to clean it up, to something called microfracture, which is an attempt to use his own stem cells to grow the cartilage back, which improved him, but he wasn’t better—certainly not good enough for the tennis that he really wanted to get back to. Steroid injection improved him again, but not quite there. You know, he was stuck in this grey area. He had no weight to lose, he was very fit anyway, so I sent him for Apos®, and he very quickly, because I wanted to follow him up out of interest, very quickly was able to tell me that even within minutes of putting the shoes on, he felt that the pain as he walked with the shoes on then was less.

“You wear them for half an hour to an hour a day. It’s a form of educating your musculature around the joint to bear weight in a different way, to fire the muscles in a different way, such that you don’t actually have to keep wearing the shoes permanently—that would be an inconvenience. It’s 30 to 60 minutes per day, and it puts your body to work the right way. I’ve been following him up, and I’m quite happy, very happy, with their return to sport. He returned to tennis, others have returned to golf, others walking the dog, others minor sports, preferably not high impact. In this case, happy patients. I personally use Apos® for patients in the grey area, early arthritis, who just aren’t getting better with traditional treatments. It’s a valid alternative treatment, and it seems to work very well.”