Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
Practice Perfect Editor
Assistant Professor,
Dept. of Podiatric Medicine,
Surgery & Biomechanics
College of Podiatric Medicine
Western University of
Health Sciences,
St. Pomona, CA

Selling Podiatry

Periodically at Western University of Health Sciences, we have open house weekends for potential applicants. We call it Preview Day. This past Saturday was one of our Preview Days. From a practicing podiatrist's standpoint, it's an interesting day. It starts at 8 AM, where we have an open fair of sorts, followed by a lecture about podiatry and the College, and a Q and A session with some of our students. We finish up the day with a guided tour by our students. The unfortunate thing is to see how many applicants there are for the other colleges in the University, and how few for podiatry.

Selling Podiatry "Podiatry is the best kept secret in medicine," I've heard (and said) many times. Everyone says this with pride and excitement. I keep hearing stories of "I wish I had gone into podiatry" from DO and MD students, residents, and sometimes physicians. "Podiatrists are the happiest doctors" I hear from so many applicants to our program.

It's on days like this that I have trouble understanding why we have such a hard time acquiring a high number of strong candidates for our profession. Applicants tell stories regarding their interest in podiatry, and I hear my own students describe their interest, and the themes are so consistent and the stories so compelling that it seems surprising that our applicant numbers are so low. Even the physician assistant college has many more applicants than podiatry.

Tonight's Premier Lecture is
Venous Leg Ulcers:
The Forgotten Vascular Disease
Robert Kirsner, MD

What are we doing wrong? Why is it so tough to sell podiatry?

Our national organizations will be happy to show you all of the advertising and different events they're working on. They'll show, for example, the "Today's Podiatrist" campaign. They'll take exception to people like me criticizing them. They've been working hard on our behalf – I'm sure they have. But I have one simple metric for success: a rapidly increasing number of highly qualified applicants to all of the podiatry schools. And I'm not seeing it. We're doing something wrong.

Here are some suggestions to increase our visibility:

Advertising. We need to hire a national advertising company that is used to large campaigns that go beyond a couple of online videos. We need a real campaign that includes multiple media outlets on both the national and local levels.
Unification. So many of our state APMA, ACFAS and other components work on the state level to advertise. This isn't working. We need to band together to create national programs that can also be utilized by the state and local components.
Court the pre-med counselors. These people have the most direct line to potential applicants to podiatric medical school. It's time to meet every one of them, educate them, and show them why podiatry is such a good profession. We should have large numbers of them invited to attend our national conferences for free and while there, they should be wined and dined by our best and brightest.
Lose the hubris. I'm no longer happy to hear that Podiatry – is-the-best-kept-secret-in-medicine line. Are we proud that we're a secret? No one wants to hear it, but for many of us, podiatry was a fall-back profession. I know it hurts to hear, but we need to get over the false pride and start marketing this as viable profession for those who didn't get into MD school. Yeah, we want applicants with 4.0 GPAs and 30 MCATs, but that's going to be rare for the time being.
Make it financially viable. Medical school's expensive, and we need to make scholarships palatable to our applicants. That means any organization that has money to spare should contact the schools and fund scholarships. It's all about the money…
Increase high quality research. I've stepped onto this soapbox many a time before, and I'll do so again. The vast majority of lower extremity research (whether poor or quality) is done by others (orthopedists, physical therapists, etc). We need to do more, and it needs to be better. We need to fund people like Stephanie Wu, DPM, who's a trained researcher. We need to create more research opportunities for interested students, residents, and podiatrists. The first step to actually being the "premier foot and ankle experts" is to do research. We have better training than orthopedists for what we do, but our research doesn't demonstrate this.
Do we all have to be surgeons? There is one more selling point we can use, but it's complicated. There is a growing trend among medical students to choose specialties which are more compatible with a normal life style. Dermatology, pathology, radiology are the most competitive residency programs. For surgery training – the numbers are declining. Today's medical students want a life in addition to everything that a medical career offers, because they've discovered that if you're not going to be a community hero or independently wealthy, at least you should have a life. They want normal work hours, less call. Traditionally, before the crazy push to be the high powered surgical specialist, we podiatrists had that enviable life. That's part of what others doctors admired about us. Maybe this is one more reason to bring back training for non-surgical podiatry. Maybe, as perverse and ironic as that sounds, that would result in more applicants. Maybe there just aren't THAT MANY applicants that want to be foot surgeons, with all that involves.

I know what many of us would say. "I'm too busy in practice to do these things." "I don't have the money to donate." "Why should I help my podiatry school?" The answer is simple. The future of our profession depends on recruiting the best applicants possible. Do you think the 4.0 GPA student or the 2.9 GPA student is more likely to move our profession into the future? The answer is obvious. In order to have this occur we need to sell podiatry for real. Is time to stop keeping the secret.