05/30/2025    Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD

RE: New Student Enrollment Campaign (Patrick DeHeer, DPM)

I am very surprised that Dr. DeHeer feels I am
merely part of the low enrollment problem and have
not exerted any effort toward a solution. He’s
wrong. I phoned his office a couple times and left
messages asking him to call but he probably never
received those pleas to talk with him, so we had
to pursue solutions on our own. He must have been
too busy to read the last dozen or so of my
postings on PM News regarding the low admissions,
how the profession feels and what to do.

With the encouragement of Dr. Allen Jacobs, we
investigated how the profession feels about a
degree change which would lead to a plenary
license, and with the help of Dr. Barry Block
constructed a survey of the profession’s attitude
toward the status quo; a three-year residency for
everyone who graduates with a DPM degree. That
survey revealed that 86% of the profession did not
feel podiatrists should be restricted to a three-
year residency in podiatric medicine and surgery
while having a DPM degree. That’s how 591 0ut of
690 of our profession feels. It’s there in black
and white.

Forty-two percent of the respondents thought if
they had it to do over, they would go to a DO
school then decide before their fourth year on
whether they wanted to follow the foot care model
we proposed in the survey or match into another
specialty rather than foot care. Fifteen percent
of our profession would definitely seek another
specialty and abandon a foot care completely. The
profession spoke and now we should listen, but it
is fair to ask why, what’s wrong with podiatry?
What I hoped to see in the survey was that
podiatry’s philosophy, its raison d`etre would be
preserved but under the auspices of a different
degree. Could the profession retain our position
as the elite foot care providers that we are, but
with a plenary degree? The profession said they
didn’t feel that way.

Perhaps the luster of limb salvage is gone? Maybe
it’s so common now we aren’t impressed with a
degree change. Other surgeons can handle the
complicated trauma that keeps us up at night.
Everyone with athlete envy can hang around a
locker room and many biomechanics afficionados
have seen the patient improve with orthotics in
the wrong shoe. Pediatric patients get better no
matter what we do. I brought Tom Kling, MD, the
chair of pediatric orthopedics at Indiana
University, to Des Moines every year to explain
how this happens as a natural growth marvel and
little intervention was needed. He felt it was
more important to learn how to talk to mom and
grandmother reassuring them this was not an
anomaly.

It may be part observation and part speculation to
say that many podiatrists simply are not
interested in the foot anymore. It’s not appealing
and doesn’t seem to be attracting numbers like it
used to. Previously it was a second or third
choice. Now there are more options. For the people
still interested in foot care, it would be more
interesting if they had a plenary license. We have
offered an option, a possible solution. I did the
research on the numbers of DO schools and searched
websites for minimal GPAs necessary for admission.
Podiatry students qualify, but will they retain
our philosophy? When chiropody dropped the DSC and
became podiatry with a DPM degree was there a
change in attitude and values? What would happen
after a general internship and a foot and ankle
residency? I have spoken to a medical
administration attorney concerning residents’
funding under the change. I have done my due
diligence. Dr. DeHeer.

If you want to be shocked, ask Google or Yahoo how
many times adults change their careers over a
lifetime. It used to be once you settled on a
profession, that was it. Now a website called
Quora states that if you were born between 1990
and 2010 you can expect to change your career 5-9
times. One of my FMGs was in an orthopedic
residency, after two years quit and is now an
organ harvester for transplants. Urology has an
early match for residencies to appeal to more
medical students. They can skip all the hassles of
the regular match, but it still doesn’t fill all
positions until after the regular match.

People don’t see urology as attractive. One young
urologist I know quit practice to go into hospital
administration. Another anesthesiologist got an
MBA from Ohio State and now serves as an
administrator. De gustibus non est disputandum.
You cannot argue taste and it seems foot and ankle
doesn’t taste as well as it did for us, but it
might be salvageable for the next generation, Dr.
DeHeer if they have a degree change. It would mean
huge changes for APMA and its limb organizations,
but really, the foot care we give is the important
thing, not the politics, right?

Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD, Columbus, OH

There are no more messages in this thread.