In my hands peroneal tendinopathy or tendonitis used to be a challenge. In the past I reckon I was close to a 100% failure rate in managing it. In the last 10 or so years I think I am now close to a 100% success in managing it. What changed? It was based on our research evidence. I talked about that in this blog post: Peroneal Tendonitis in Runners on my running research blog. It was pretty clear that almost everyone with peroneal tendinopathy had a lower than average supination resistance. That means the force needed to supinate the foot was low and as a consequence the peroneal tendons have to work harder, increasing the risk for tendinopathy. This also means that those with it need lateral wedging under the heel to decrease the loads in the tendon. That wedging actually leads to a substantial reduction in the forces that the tendon is subjected to, so hence the lateral wedging is a very and often is dramatically effective to manage peroneal tendonitis.

Yes, lateral wedges do try to pronate the foot more, but never had a problem with doing that. It did take a mindset change to get confident to start doing this 10 or more years ago, but I have not looked back. This is a perfect example of research informing and changing clinical practice.

This also means that a typically arch supporting medially wedged foot orthotic is going to increase the load on the peroneal tendon and is not going to be indicated. This also explains why I had almost a 100% failure on managing this in the past.

Also, of course, we do the usual load management approaches to this tendon once that reduction in load on the tendon with the wedge is done.