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A wide foot and a narrow foot can't usually wear the same bunion product. That's why most women who walk into my office have tried two or three different ones and given up on all of them. The photo above this article is the first time in my thirty years of practice I've been able to fit both of these patients with the same sleeve. Here's what changed. Every week, two women sit across from me in my exam room who, on paper, should need completely different products. One has wide feet. Maybe she's been a nurse for twenty years and her feet have spread out over thousands of shifts. The other has narrow feet. Maybe she had ballerina feet in her twenties and she's still petite at sixty. Both have bunions. Both have tried products. Both have ended up disappointed for the same reason. Whatever they bought fit one shape of foot. The wide-footed woman bought something that cut off her circulation. The narrow-footed woman bought the same product and it slid off in her shoe. They both gave up. They both ended up in my office. And for years, the honest answer I had to give them was that I could try to help them with shoe choices and a few exercises — but the bunion itself was going to keep moving in the wrong direction unless they were willing to consider surgery. I don't recommend bunion surgery for most women. I've seen too many recurrences. Too many women who spent thousands of dollars and six weeks on a knee scooter only to have the bump come back two years later. So I needed a non-surgical answer I could actually stand behind. A few years ago, I helped develop a fabric sleeve that worked for a lot of women. It still works for the women whose feet matched the size we built it around. But the more I fit it on patients, the more I noticed something. A fixed-size sleeve, no matter how well-designed, can only really take care of the woman whose foot is close to the size you built it around. The woman with the narrower foot needs it snugger. The woman with the wider foot needs it to give her more room. The woman somewhere in between needs it to land somewhere in between. So last fall, I went back to my engineers with a single ask. Build me a sleeve that can fit both of those women. The same sleeve. Two completely different feet. The result is the new TrueAlign Adjustable Mesh Sleeve. There's a Velcro strap built into the side of the sleeve. It has five tension settings. Setting 1 is the gentlest. Setting 5 is the strongest. The woman with the wider foot in the photo above is wearing the sleeve at Setting 4. The woman with the narrower foot is wearing the same sleeve at Setting 2. Two completely different feet, one product, two different settings. That's the thing I'd been trying to figure out how to build for years. Let me tell you about two real patients of mine to give you a sense of what this means in practice. The first is a woman I'll call Janet. Sixty-four years old. Wide feet — she's a size 9 in length but a size 11 in width. She'd been a hospital cafeteria worker for thirty-two years before she retired. She came in last June with both bunions inflamed and told me she'd tried two plastic correctors and a toe spacer. The plastic correctors were unwearable past an hour. The toe spacer fell out of her shoes within a week. I put her at Setting 4 of the new sleeve. Three months in, she's at Setting 4 in the morning and bumps to Setting 5 in the evening. She told me last visit she walked through a full afternoon at the zoo with her grandkids in October. First time in four years. The second patient I'll call Caroline. Sixty-eight years old. Narrow feet, high arch — the kind of foot that's always too narrow for the shoes in the store. She'd worn ballet flats her whole adult life and her bunions had snuck up on her in her late fifties. She'd tried a gel cushion and a plastic night corrector. The gel cushion slid around in her shoe. The plastic corrector dug into her joint so hard she gave up on it within two weeks. I put her at Setting 1 of the new sleeve for the first three nights. She moved up to Setting 2 in week two and that's where she's stayed. She told me last month she wore sandals to a wedding in September. She hadn't worn sandals to anything in seven years. Janet and Caroline have feet that have almost nothing in common with each other. Different widths. Different lengths. Different arches. Different lifetimes of standing on them. They are wearing the same sleeve. Set to different tensions, but the same sleeve. That's what's new. Two other features I want to mention about the new product. The first is the material. The new sleeve is built from a breathable medical-grade mesh. Which means it stays cool through long shifts, hot kitchens, summer afternoons. Janet — the cafeteria worker — was the kind of woman I was thinking about when we picked it. The second is the cross-strap that goes around the whole foot, not just the big toe side. Roughly one in three women I see has a second bunion on the pinky-toe side — what's called a tailor's bunion. If you have one too, this is the first fabric sleeve I'm aware of that supports both at once. I want to be honest with you about what this product can and can't do. It is not surgery. It will not make your bunion disappear overnight. Pain relief comes in days. Visible alignment comes in weeks. Lasting improvement comes in months — sometimes a year or more — and only if you wear it the hours it needs to be worn. But here's what I can tell you. For the first time in my career, I can put a wide-footed cafeteria worker and a narrow-footed retired ballerina in the same product. They walk out of my office wearing the same sleeve, set to different tensions, both of them with a real answer for the first time. That's the photo above this article. Janet's foot on the left. Caroline's on the right. The same sleeve on both. 👇 Read about the new adjustable bunion sleeve