09/19/2023    

RESPONSES/COMMENTS (CANADIAN PODIATRY)

RE: The Sad State of Podiatry in Ontario, Canada 

From: PM News Canadian Subscriber

 

In Ontario, Canada, podiatrists are especially pessimistic about the podiatry profession. In 1983, there were 100+ podiatrists registered to practice here. Forty years later, there are now 60+ podiatrists registered to practice in Ontario, Canada. The very brief history of this situation is due to podiatrists performing osseous surgery that did not go well. The patients with poor results would see orthopaedic surgeons and sometimes the orthopods would perform corrective revision surgery. 

 

How Ontario podiatrists got screwed.

 

The patients and the orthopaedic surgeons complained to the Minister of Health, and the profession was shut down August 1, 1993. DPMs, after this date, could register as chiropodists with the College of Chiropodists of Ontario. To keep the profession buried, a DPM registered as a chiropodist, implanted experimental, modified copies of the HyProCure implant on unsuspecting patients. The modified copy is on the left.

 

PM News Canadian Subscriber

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09/21/2023    

RESPONSES/COMMENTS (CANADIAN PODIATRY)

RE: The Sad State of Podiatry in Ontario, Canada (PM News Canadian Subscriber)

From: Bruce Ramsden, DPM

 

On behalf of the Ontario Podiatric Medical Association, I'm writing to correct statements made in "The Sad State of Podiatry in Ontario" published in the September 19 edition of PM News. There were two principle reasons for the Ontario government opting for a chiropody model of foot care in the late 1970s. One was that the UK chiropody model as it then existed was thought by the government-of-the-day to be a better fit with Ontario's hospital-centric healthcare delivery paradigm as it was at the time. While orthopedic surgeons may have supported that decision, there is no evidence that such support had a major impact.

 

The second reason was that there was an insufficient supply of podiatrists to respond to the demand for foot care and no likelihood that the supply-demand gap would be closed. A cause of that supply-demand gap was that no podiatry education program existed in Canada. Having made this decision to introduce a chiropody model, the Ontario government committed...

 

Editor's note: Dr. Ramsden's extended-length letter can be read here.