Eli Brackenbury

I’m an occupational health nurse, I’ve been working for 5 years, a nurse in general for 7 years. I currently work in a manufacturing facility with hundreds of employees. I live in Richmond, Washington. I grew up here and went to college in Washington. I lived in Idaho and then moved back here with my family because it’s a great place to raise the family. It’s a fantastic job and opportunity to focus on prevention rather than rally around some acute emergency in the typical nursing world.

This is where my passion comes in, I’m duty bound to help the folks here, more than their home, to feel better. That’s my main focus. My manager had gone to a safety conference in Portland, Oregon and met up with Protalus and brought some samples back to try. They were pretty fantastic, I had personally suffered from lower back pain, and sciatica on occasion, I personally spent almost $400 on a product made specifically to my foot, but yeah they worked but they were expensive.

When I put Protalus in my shoes, I thought this was a match made in heaven, how we just sorta came across them in a safety conference and found out their product was exactly what our employees would need. They need this product in their life because they have tired feet and sore backs. We just happened to run into them in the conference and it was perfect timing for both of us.

We’ve got a relationship with three shoe vendors here locally, those three vendors that provide our safety shoes also provide all types of inserts, they have a machine where you stand on the foot pads and it measures your pressure points and recommends an insert. I have the flattest feet in the world and so I need a lot of arch support.

So when I put in these Protalus inserts, in my shoes, before I even stand up and put weight on my feet, you can feel a difference in the contour of the insert to your foot, give it a few minutes and it will sort of meld into your foot. I had lower back pain and I did have some knee and ankle pain, just from the flat feet, and having these inserts in my shoes whether at work or outside of work, makes all the difference in the world and makes those pains disappear.

There has been a lot of success at work with the plantar fasciitis, the sore backs, the sore feet, with this product, 100% based on the design and support Protalus provides. It’s an easy referral for me because I know the product works, I know the product is fantastic, I know the customer service is great, so that if the employees ever have questions, I feel comfortable saying we will reach out and call these folks because they will help you out, it’s a win win situation for everybody.

In the medical field, this job is not something people know, oh you’re an occupational health nurse, what is that? It is truly an opportunity to help people really from the ground up. It doesn’t just start at the plant, you help people at the plant and then they start taking what they learn to hear back home with them to their friends and family. That just doesn’t happen, in the medical field, people work so hard to control disease instead of preventing it. People don’t have sore feet here, because of Protalus.

Even those that were a little too far gone, that we try to reel back. You don’t hear about them anymore, you just don’t. And so I attribute that to one, some attention, I can’t give myself zero credit, but at the same time, if I didn’t have a product like this, I wouldn’t be able to do that, I’d be struggling. And so when a lot of plants are calling me saying how do you do this. Well here is a phone number and I want you to call Protalus and to keep an open mind.

And if you run into resistance because oh my gosh this costs money, it’s not an expense, it’s an investment, I don’t even care how much I spend on this product, it doesn’t even cross my mind except when I do my expense report, and nobody asks me anything about why did you spend so much, it’s not even an issue, we make this investment in human capital so we can all have jobs tomorrow, because if we don’t have them, we don’t have anything. It’s really a win win, It’s really a blessing to come across Protalus for sure.