12/13/2025    Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD

Who Are We? (Paul Kesselman, DPM)

The question is not, “Who are we?,” but should be,
“Whom do we want to become? “Who we are is too
much of what we used to be, practitioners who
could only use a scalpel parallel to the skin,
then experts in soft tissue surgery followed by
forefoot bone surgery, then a Kirschner wire.
Being a podiatrist was like landing on Iwo Jima
and fighting for every inch of the foot. ACGME has
now asked us, not we asked them, if ACGME would
like to look at our post graduate training to see
if we are on par with MD and DO residencies.

They are asking us; something we never thought
would happen. There is a chance ACGME learns
something from us and vice versa. What we cannot
do is shun them by rejecting that once in maybe a
lifetime offer because we have become complacent
in our own apathy. It’s no time to reminisce about
how much we made last year or how happy we were
because we were elected secretary of the hospital
staff because we got an MPH at the same time we
earned a DPM degree and because of the MPH and a
three-year residency have become totally accepted
by the MD/DO community. We get jobs nobody wants
because it will keep the squeaky wheel silent.

Occasionally a podiatrist may get a meaningful
public health job, but that MPH is from someplace
like Columbia University and the research
performed to earn it generated authentic new
knowledge.This may be a generational offer by
ACGME to open the door to parity. There would
still be a lot of work to do, and along the road
to a DO degree there may be hiccups and flat
tires, but we will be able to say that our
residencies are equal to MD and DO residencies.

Nobody is swapping in their DPM degree and getting
DO business cards, but you can bet when DO
graduates complete a DO residency their business
cards will say DO then maybe MPH behind their
name. For a current DPM to pontificate and say
there is no reason or need for the next cohort of
graduates to earn a DO degree when they could have
that DO degree is simply selfish and self-serving.
How could a DPM who has worked their whole life to
build a million-dollar practice sell that practice
to a new DO podiatrist? I’ll bet an enterprising
DPM could find a solution.

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

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12/09/2025    Robert Kornfeld, DPM

Who Are We? (Paul Kesselman, DPM)

I graduated NYCPM in 1980. Back then, podiatry
wasn’t at all happy with what it was but also had
no clear plan to make things different. I won’t go
into what didn’t happen over the past 45 years.
Suffice it to say there is a large number of
podiatrists today (way too many) who are loathe to
identify themselves as podiatrists. They are “foot
and ankle surgeons”. That says a lot about the
morale of this profession and how our colleagues
feel about their status among MDs and DOs.

Now there’s talk about the DO degree as if that
will solve all the problems our profession faces.
I’m not going to say it’s a bad idea. In fact, I
think it would be a good one. But it won’t change
things for many years to come and does not address
our challenges now. We have an obligation to every
DPM practicing in the U.S. today to do something
now. Something that will change things for the
better. I opine we have wasted decades worrying
about our status with MDs and DOs and payment
parity from insurance companies. Our focus should
have been on the public. And we have completely
ignored that aspect of how we are seen in society.

I felt that our leaders took us in a very wrong
direction back then. What I did to change my
experience was to learn holistic/functional
medicine and regenerative medicine. These 2
paradigms connect the foot to the patient. When
practiced properly, you change lives. You heal the
foot pathology with more reliable outcomes and up
level the health of your patients. That creates a
unique reputation. This niche enabled me to walk
away from insurance dependency and enjoy a direct-
pay practice for the past 25 years.

I have no issues with parity and the MDs and DOs I
interact with have a lot of respect for what I do.
Most importantly, my reputation amongst my
patients is stellar. I’m proud to call myself a
podiatrist. It’s what I am. And I’m really good at
what I offer to my patients. Where am I going with
this? We need to incorporate the whole body -
epigenetics and genetics, into our assessments.
That puts us in “parity” and it teaches the public
that we can help them in ways they never knew. And
it up levels our potency as doctors. Let’s start
there. It is the future of medicine. And we’re
allowing ourselves to fall way behind.

Robert Kornfeld, DPM, NY, NY