The debate continues over plenary degree, the end
of podiatry, student recruitment, etc. There are
certainly a lot of armchair generals weighing in
on a solution. Many have good points to make and I
do not want to make light of those. However, very
rarely is a bright light comment made on chiropody
in these posts. Dr. Jacobs did an excellent job
highlighting the changes that many of us have
observed on a prior post podiatrists who are
faculty in medical schools, leaders in wound care,
the complex surgeries are residents are taught,
and so on. Show your board certification
credentials and the operating room is yours to
practice in, just like any area of medicine.
I think of podiatry as a premier medical
profession to enter and is just not marketed
correctly and remains mostly unknown to potential
students. Does the answer lie in making a cheaper
pathway ? Maybe. But I think many of the
advancements of podiatry are due in part by
following the structure of allopathic medicine. We
practice in an allopathic medical world. They make
the rules and that is what we get compared to.
Remember- the cost of education in MD and DO
programs is much the same as ours. If I were a
marketing person, I would point out that in
medicine not every medical school graduate gets
their chosen specialty, however in Podiatry you
do. I am not saying everyone has to do surgery.
When Allan Jacobs and I ran a residency in St
Louis, we did very complex reconstructive surgery.
All our residents were taught this but those who
graduated chose how much of that they wanted to
practice. Not everyone needs to be a surgeon, but
the choice is there.
Let me share some straight-forward statistics from
AI about MD/DO match rates for residency upon
graduating medical school:
• “Highly Competitive Specialties (Match Rates:
'65% – 80%)”
• “U.S. MD Seniors: Roughly 68% to 72%
successfully match into an orthopedic surgery
residency position. This means nearly 1 in 4
highly qualified U.S. MD seniors do not match into
the specialty.” And this number is much lower for
DOs.
So imagine that when you graduate medical school
and you have dreamed of being a surgeon and that
can’t happen. Imagine the same expensive road and
all that hard work and your dream doesn’t come
true. In podiatry, that does not happen. If you
want to be surgeon that is not a problem. Those
medical school graduates of course have choices.
Well there is always primary care or pediatrics
and be happy with making a salary less than a
podiatrist with the same debt in a specialty you
did not want.
Dr. Secord, sorry to tack on to yours, but I agree
with you in many ways. And certainly with your
comments about “self denigration”.
Lawrence Oloff, DPM, San Francisco, CA
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