wow!

wow!

I entered podiatry jobs into a search engine and stumbled upon this site. And spent the last few hours reading the gutwrenching, bitter, sarcastic postings.

I graduated from the Chicago school in 1987. After two years of postgraduate training I pursued private practice in the south. My practice prospered. I was seeing around 2500(two thousand five hundred) new patients a year. In my third month of practice I deposited over $35,000 and so was on my way to what I thought would be a productive career. My practice was growing by 40% a year. I was the only Podiatrist for 400,000 people in a 50 mile radius. (Mississippi)

Then Bill Clinton became President. Hell, I voted for the guy. That next year, my gross revenues declined. They actually only declined by a few thousand dollars, but the growth was over, and that got my attention. I immediately decided to apply to Medical School. I sold my practice to an unlucky gentleman from the north who was looking for an escape from an area overpopulated with podiatrists. I call him unlucky because he could have started his own practice 25 miles to the west for 10% of what he paid me and in three or four months been just as well off. The point is I knew I was in a situation which was going to worsen. And the practice I sold which had been over 70% private insurance and heavily surgical(in my last 12 months I performed permanent nails {11750} on 750 patients and hammertoe operations on 180) has gone to weed. It's 99% medicare, and I imagine a very difficult financial situation for the purchaser.

I write to give my opinions on Podiatry and Medicine. First, I have never heard an M.D. say anything derogatory about Podiatry. When I was a practicing Footdoc I always felt as if they looked down on me or had little respect for me. They were always nice to me but I still felt like a black man in Selma AL circa 1966. My perspective now is that was my mistaken perception. Podiatry has the appropriate respect from organized medicine, it's feelings of inferiority-your feelings of inferiority-are your problem, not Medicines.

All branches of healthcare are suffering today. Podiatry perhaps more than most because you are a small fractious community. If you dissapeared you would be missed, but society would go on. In fact, it is incorrect for you all to assume that you are the best providers of certain services.

As an Anesthesiologist, I have the opportunity to watch both orthopods and podiatrists in action and I have to say that your ignorance is sometimes painful and always embarassing to watch. You simply don't know anything about medicine. An R.N. seems to understand more about general medicine than a podiatrist. That is a situation that needs to change. Orthopedic surgeons seem to do an excellent job with foot surgery. Many podiatrists practicing simply don't have the training to perform bone surgery.
Podiatrists lack the basis to treat for instance a postoperative wound infection as well as an M.D.

Changing Podiatric education is the key. My education in podiatry does not even approach my training as an M.D. If I had entered my med school examinations with the same degree of preparation as in podiatry school I would never have passed a single examination. Not one. Iwould have flunked out my first semester. In fact when I was in medical school I used to think that my podiatry studies for the same topics would have yielded me about a 35% . And that isn't passing.

Clinical education in podiatry needs to upgrade. I was basically taught how to treat corns, calluses, and thickened toenails at Scholl. Nothing more. You should forget all that until residency and do rotations in Allopathic medicine. Treat patients with pancreatitis and ketoacidosis and lung cancer and acut asthma and chest pain and etc. and then, after pod school, concentrate on the foot.

This would be difficult for the colleges to develop.

The future of Podiatry is not foot surgery. That will certainly be taken from by Orthopedists and Insurance Ccompanies. The future of Podiatry is what the schools teach best--routine care care and orthotics.

Podiatrists are too caught up in competition with allopathic physicians. And you won't win that competition. You refer to pod schools as if they were med schools. they aren't. so what? You claim to be the best source of expertise on the foot. And you know a lot. But, you don't know as much, as a whole, as a dermatologist or an orthopedist or an internist and you never will.

Friends of mine in Podiatry say that the multi year surgical residency is the key to acceptance, the key to success and recognition. I think they are wrong. I've been reviewing today the saga of Brian Gale and the North Dakota Board. I don't know but it seems entirly feasible to me that he thought he was some super hotshot of a surgeon and that in reality he was just in over his head. And I may be entirely wrong about that, but I know this, that no matter how long of a residency he did in podiatry, and how many fancy surgeries he does, he still doesn't know what he needs to know to fully and completely offer surgical services to his patients.