06/30/2025 Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD
Our House is on Fire
If you read the recent article titled, “Our House
is on Fire” in Podiatry Management it’s probably
because you have some interest in podiatric
education. You still have a large loan for your
education, you are looking to hire a new
associate/partner, thinking about selling your
practice to a future graduate, teach at one of the
podiatry schools, are a podiatric residency
director, or are a current podiatry student. That
pretty much takes care of the whole profession
and, I might sum it all up by stating, “You have a
skin in this game.”
Dr. DeHeer reminded me that it’s easy to be a
Monday morning quarterback when tragedy arises.
Almost as easy as it is to scream, “Monday morning
quarterback.” By now we expect more. Let me remind
Dr. DeHeer that as President of the APMA, he has
moved through all the chairs and probably has some
thoughts about podiatric education. I guess
everyone missed the proverbial light at the end of
the tunnel not being daylight but the speeding
reality locomotive. As president of the
Association, which I may have joined before he
did, he should given the future of the profession
at least a small corner of his platform.
Trump had a concept and Harris joined the party
late, and well DeHeer has come up with the
podiatric education comb over, the Foundation for
Podiatric Education. And like most comb overs,
it’s too little and much too late. No one will
tell you how ludicrous the comb over or FPE looks
until you incorporate a swirl in the hair that
starts directly over the left ear. People laugh at
the comb over behind your back. It’s almost as bad
as a cheap toupee. Podiatry would be better off
offering a podiatry Ccamp at the schools and
showing prospective podiatry students what we have
to offer instead of marketing by direct mailing or
on campus radio spots. These might work and took
me 30 seconds to come up with.
I was mulling over the Foundation for Podiatric
Education (FPE) and the whole idea of marketing
the profession. I was searching the internet for
evidence of advertising the other doctor/non-
physician professions that continue to grow and
prosper. Funny thing, I really couldn’t find any.
They have no marketing problems, yet they don’t
market.
I remember as a youngster sitting around the
wireless with Ma and Pa on Sunday nights listening
to the wireless for programs like “Jack Benny” and
“The Shadow” and there was no mention of chiropody
during what they called commercials. Nothing even
between innings of those baseball games. Now I do
recall when buses came into vogue and a doctor
would have his likeness on a waiting bench talking
about sore feet and how he could fix them, almost
like today’s Good Feet Store. Same with individual
chiropractors. I guess if those lifestyles
appealed to you, and you thought about following
in their footsteps, (pun intended) you had to go
to their office and find out where to go to
school. I guess that worked cause there’s more of
them today than ever. Never once did I hear about
nurse anesthetists until one taught me how to
perform an epidural block during an anesthesia
rotation as a first-year resident.
When I looked into podiatry, I had no idea where a
school was, didn’t know how long it the course of
study lasted and was surprised to find out it took
four years to learn about the foot. I asked a
podiatrist why it took so long to be a
chiropodist/podiatrist if you only learned about
the foot. He said you learned about the whole
body. I kept thinking to myself why would they
call themselves foot doctors if they knew
everything?
Seriously, here’s where I have a problem. Podiatry
is a bigger secret than the B-2 bomb run the other
day. My first visit to a podiatry school was to
take that exam that included flipping a pack of
cigarettes around into different projections and
identifying what it would look like. Then there
was an interview which was preceded by a phone
call to the interviewer from Dr. Marvin Shapiro
the president of the APMA in 1959. The interviewer
who eventually became president of the APMA was
Terry Albright who spoke to Dr. Shapiro in front
of me. That’s the way things were done back then,
a handshake and a pat on the back with no one
trying to sell you anything or pretending to be
something they weren’t.
OCPM at the time was a pre-depression apartment
building that a magician architect (the same guy
who developed the three-dimensional section of the
entrance exam) turned into more classrooms and
labs than should fit into that cubic space. And we
had a basement where you could get your hair cut
and scan an old exam with hopes you’d see a couple
questions again. We were the first distance
learners. You could watch a lecture on TV in a
dead room while eating, drinking, and smoking. You
could smell the anatomy lab from anywhere in the
building because the cadavers were stored in the
HVAC room.
We moved to a palace for our senior year. Pool
tables, ping pong table, and a pinball machine
called OXO that played for the whole school for
25¢ per day. Not per player, but the first guy to
play in the morning could jiggle the machine to
earn enough free plays for all of us to play the
rest of the day. There was also a cocktail lounge
on the first floor that got crowded after a long
afternoon in the clinic or on holidays like St.
Patrick’s Day. Don’t get me wrong, OCPM was not
Animal House.
In retrospect, we were the first adult learners
who had fun learning and proved we could still
learn. We did as well on our boards and residency
matches as the other schools and as soon as we
were able became walking advertisements for the
profession. I think we, WE, were the marketers of
the profession and most assuredly our school. Most
of us belonged to a fraternity and were part of
the bigger OCPM family and felt that way. We
didn’t have to wear a sandwich board pushing
podiatry. We were podiatry: nothing more, nothing
less. We were proud of what we did and people saw
that. How many nurses in your hospital needed foot
surgery and asked you to do it?
I learned something a few years ago that baffled
me. I was the podiatrist who introduced Brad
Wenstrup a U.S. Congressman from Cincinnati to
podiatric medicine. He worked summers during
college at a resort our family had been visiting
every year for over 30 years. In July 1979 three
weeks after finishing my two-year residency in
Philadelphia and Cherry Hill, a waitress, whose
father was a general surgeon, fell on a drinking
glass in the kitchen of the resort severing her
lesser saphenous vein. Brad knew I was a doctor,
but not what kind. He came out to the dining room
to get me. I went into the kitchen and took care
of the situation like any of you would. But I rode
to the hospital with the young lady and met her
dad who was very impressed.
Brad went to the Dr. Scholl College of Podiatric
Medicine but I don’t hold that against him. You
might recall Brad saved Republican congressman
Steve Scalise’s life from sniper fire during a
congressional baseball practice. Before Congress,
Brad served as the chief of Surgery at Abu Ghraib
hospital in Iraq. He also served as chair of the
House Select Subcommittee on the origin of COVID-
19 from January 23, 2023 to January 3, 2025.I
never said a word about podiatry to Brad during
the four years he worked at the resort in northern
Michigan. I never knew he was a podiatrist until
he won his seat in Congress. He tells people I’m
the podiatrist that got him interested in our
profession.
When I was practicing in Monroe, MI after
completing my residency, I met a young man at the
gym I worked out at. He had just completed his
first year of chiropractic school. With no real
effort on my part except being me, he started
podiatry school in Des Moines that fall where he
excelled. All we need to do is be who we are, and
be that well.
WNL is the abbreviation for Within Normal Limits
when we wrote progress notes, right? Not always.
It can mean We Never Looked. There are people who
never looked at the enrollment at the podiatry
schools. People want to hold offices in the local,
state and national podiatry organizations. Part of
their job is to keep their finger on the pulse of
what’s going on in the profession and deliver the
news, good or bad to the rest of the profession.
Either WNL’ed or this is where the concepts of
transparency and authenticity come into play and
are quickly dismissed. I guess I would be
embarrassed if attendance at the podiatry schools
plummeted under my watch and I would want to keep
it a secret pretending it was a passing fantasy.
But all the schools?
Same with the cost of a Seal of Approval for a
product to be endorsed by the APMA. I wonder if
the folks on that Seal of Approval committee sign
a NDA, known in some circles as omerta. I’ve been
trying for three days to get the latest
application numbers from AACPM with no answer. I
just received an email from Dr. DeHeer who I did
not personally ask for the applicant information.
He obfuscated by saying the information would be
available at the end of the admission cycle.
Omerta (as practiced by the Mafia) is a code of
silence about criminal activity and a refusal to
give evidence to authorities. Of course, there
will be some creative reply why the delay when the
numbers come. For some reason we don’t get to know
when we asked. Omerta.
Redemption is a wonderful thing. It gives even the
most recalcitrant recidivists a second chance, or
a third or fourth. Redemption does require one
openly admits to the transgressions, is sincerely
contrite, promises to mend their ways and makes
amends. Why do all that when there is this veil of
secrecy we allowed to be created and tolerated. Is
there accountability? It all starts early in
school when students get their gray coats. If you
want a good laugh, juxtapose the podiatric oath
with what you know to be the truth.
Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD
Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD, Columbus, OH
