After hypothesizing a mean pain reduction through the brace on the visual analog scale (VAS) for pain from 5 to 3 with a standard deviation of 1, we calculated that at a power level of 99% and an alpha error of 5%, and given that the VAS numbers were normally distributed, we needed 22 patients to enroll into the study. We increased this number to 30 to account for early and late dropouts.