Background: The prevalence and incidence of low back pain in general society is high. Workers whose job involves walking long distances have even a higher tendency to suffer from low back pain.

Purpose: Our goal was to examine the effect of insoles on low back pain among workers whose job involves long-distance walking.

Methods: In this double blind prospective study we examined the effectiveness of insoles constructed in a computerized method to placebo insoles in 58 employees whose work entailed extensive walking and who suffered from low back pain. The evaluation was performed by the MILLION questionnaire.

Results: 81% of the employees preferred the real insoles in comparison to 19% of the users of the placebo insoles (p < 0.05). A substantial improvement in the LBP after the use of the true insoles was noted.. The average pain intensity before the use of the insoles was 5.46. However, after the use of the real insoles and the placebo insoles the average pain intensity decreased to 3.96 and 5.11 respectively. The difference of the average pain intensity at the start of the study and after the use of the real insoles was significant: −1.49 (p=0.0001), whereas this difference after the use of the placebo insoles was not significant: −0.31 (p=0.1189). A level 5 pain and above was reported by 77% of the subjects at the start of the study. After the use of the real insoles 37.9% of the subjects reported a similar degree of pain severity, and 50% of the subjects did so after the use of the placebo (p< 0.05).

Conclusions: LBP decreased significantly after the use of real insoles compared to placebo ones.