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

Podiatry - The Sixth Most Unhealthy Profession?

A couple of days ago, one of my residents brought an interesting article in PM News to my attention. Picture this for a moment. I'm standing there in clinic – we were discussing some clinical teaching points between patients – and my resident says, "Hey, Dr. Shapiro, listen to this."

After he told me, I thought he was kidding.

He read an online article in PM News, aggregated from Business Insider, describing that my life's career choice, my beloved profession, my sweet baby podiatry (I know it's a little over the top...but you get the point) is actually…

Drum roll please...

THE SIXTH MOST UNHEALTHY PROFESSION!!!!!!

My first comment was, this is a pile of horse droppings (I was a bit more colorful at the time). I mean, podiatry? Really? When I think of hazardous jobs, I think of military infantry, firemen, policemen, and hazmat workers.

Who, pray tell, came up with this genius information?

Apparently, this earth-shattering news comes from Business Insider, who used data from the Occupational Information Network or O*Net (https://www.onetonline.org/) which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

These "researchers" at Business Insider used an "Unhealthiness Score" to compare health risks of various occupations. Very scientific. Is this a validated score? Hmm. I wonder. Here's how they did this, as far as I can figure out. They looked at O*Net's database, which aggregated data from 974 occupations. They averaged scores across six categories as follows:

		Tonight's Premier Lecture is Tinea Pedis: It's More Important Than You Think - Pt1 Warren Joseph, DPM, FIDSA

They determined a score for each occupation on a scale from 0 to 100. According to this "research", podiatry ranked 6^th as a result of an Unhealthiness Score of 60.2 out of 100.

Our top three health risks were:

Just for comparison, here are the top 15 most hazardous jobs to our health in ascending order, according to the brain trust at Business Insider:

How do podiatry's other three characteristics rate? I have no clue and couldn't find the answer.  

As anyone would do, I tried to go back to the source of the information.

Oops…The original article had exactly ZERO citations.

So, I went to O*Net online to try to find the U.S. Department of Labor database from which they acquired this information. I found…NOTHING. When I looked up the summary report for the occupation of podiatrists on this site, I found a description of podiatry including job skills, demands, average income, and many other things. Did I find anything at all about the health risks of podiatry or any health risk score or anything vaguely related? NOPE.

Maybe there would be something in the medical literature about this "Unhealthiness Score." Off to PubMed I went. See below the result of my search.

As you might expect, there were exactly ZERO hits.

I then went directly to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and wasn't able to find anything about health risks of various professions.

Now, I'm not saying the statistics aren't there somewhere, but they're buried awfully deep, and it's virtually impossible to determine their validity. Let's say Business Insider did find the data from these 974 occupations. I'll give them that. But they made so many other methodological mistakes that I'd need another two Practice Perfect editorials to describe their errors.

I'll give one quick example. They list six characteristics for each occupation, but which of the six characteristics is a more significant contributor to a person's health? Is "exposure to contaminants" a more significant player than "hazardous conditions?" What does "hazardous conditions" mean, anyway? How did they calculate the number to assign to each category? How do they know a podiatrist spends too much time sitting?

Suffice it to say these people took what was probably raw data, assigned a fake scoring system, and made nonsense conclusions based on that system. This is journalism at its worst. Perhaps, next time, Business Insider, you'll consider the old adage "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Garbage in, garbage out, guys. Plain and simple.

By the way, here's an image I took from Business Insider's website at the bottom of the final page of their "report". It's good to know the people who are "studying" and "rating" the health risks of our profession – potentially hurting us – are also "studying" such life altering material as "Celebrity Transformations" and dress-up pictures of Angelina Jolie.

Thanks for the stellar scientific work, Business Insider. We can all rest assured that you're damaging our profession with junk research and faulty conclusions while making it look like valid research. With friends like you who needs enemies?

Best wishes.

Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
PRESENT Practice Perfect Editor
[email protected]

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