Meet Dr. Howard Dananberg

Women around the world have for centuries enthusiastically chosen to wear high-heeled shoes in the name of fashion, despite the pain and even serious injury they can inflict on the wearer, including toe, heel, knee and even back pain.

Podiatrist, Dr. Howard Dananberg DPM, had seen all too many cases in his Bedford, New Hampshire practice of women stricken with foot dysfunction and lower back pain caused by their high-heel habits. Beginning with research conducted in the 1980s, he set out to remedy the problem. The end result was the Insolia insert, a bio-mechanically designed shoe insole technology that very well may be just what the doctor ordered for millions of fashion victims.

Born in New York City in 1949, Dananberg attended Stuyvesant High School and Queens College before entering the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine in Cleveland in 1971. He earned a doctoral degree there in podiatric medicine in 1975, and after completing his residency entered private practice in Manchester, New Hampshire. Dananberg became immersed in the study of in-shoe pressure analysis and its use in the treatment of chronic musculoskeletal pain. He began doing research to develop novel techniques and technologies that have been successful in helping men and women relieve a variety of walking-effected symptoms throughout the body.

One of his most important discoveries was of the phenomenon of sagittal plane foot dysfunction and its effect on gait style and mechanical overuse. For his series of articles detailing the ways in which foot dysfunction can impact posture and gait, Dananberg received the 1994 Scholl's Award for Outstanding Clinical Paper of the Year, published in the Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association. In 1999, he published a two-year outcome assessment study describing the effects of gait style on chronic lower back pain.

In pursuit of his research interests, Dananberg in the early 1980s became involved with computerized in-shoe pressure testing. A new shoe construction that he patented and invented known as the "Kinetic Wedge" improved the comfort of running shoes. He licensed the technology to the Brooks Running Shoe Company, which came up with its commercial name. Via this experience Dananberg learned a great deal about the shoe industry, and, responding to a patient's challenge, he began to look toward an even more difficult problem: how to make high heels more comfortable.

He began his research by asking women walking on city streets about their walking and fashion habits, and quickly he determined a great market opportunity existed for a technology that could fit into fashionable, sexy-looking high-heeled shoes. His concept would have to be adaptable so as not to change the look of high heels. This would prove to be very important.

Dananberg learned that for women, walking in high heels was much like walking downhill. Weight was shifted to the ball of the foot, as if the wearer were standing on a ramp. This can cause all sorts of problems, including bunions, hammer toes, knee and back pain. Dananberg realized that if he could find a way to shift the weight, giving some of it back to the heel to create a more even distributed-pressure relationship, high heels might begin to feel like flat shoes.

Using F-Scan technology to map pressure points exerted by the foot at various heel heights, he was able to create a flexible insole that would put the foot in optimal position. The construction, called a "cup and bump" by the inventor, cups the heel and increases contact area throughout the sole so that high heels suddenly feel about half as high as what the wearer is actually wearing.

After perfecting the concept Dananberg patented the technology and working with HBN Shoe, developed the Insolia High Heel Insert.