Actually don't lock, I wanted to ask a serious question: what exactly makes a podiatrist a sports medicine specialist?
In residency, I was at a teaching hospital with orthopedic sports medicine fellows. At some points, I'd chat them up about foot/ankle surgery and they'd just shrug. Most athletes injure their knees/shoulders and that was their focus. Yeah there's Achilles, lateral ankle, Jones fx, but not the mainstay of their work.
It’s not about non-surgery vs. surgery (more accurately “when to perform surgery”).
It’s about working on a medical team to keep a professional athlete in the game and avoid injury.
This is a pretty good take, I understand there are a lot of nonoperative MD sports docs who do just this, focus on training, rehab, nutrition. In some ways, it's highly specialized but in others it's not specialized at all. You could be a MD, DPM, PT, RD...
At one point at a conference, I talked to Amol Saxena (whom I respect) at a conference about this. I asked him what kind of services he can offer an athlete beyond any other highly trained foot and ankle surgeon who doesn't identify as a sports medicine specialist. He talked about lisfranc sprains, lateral ankle injury, etc but nothing that's beyond anyone with well rounded training.
At a different conference (AAPSM), Saxena said "the difference between a podiatrist and a foot and ankle surgeon is if you're doing more cases per month than orthotics, and the difference between a sports medicine podiatrist and a foot and ankle surgeon is if you're doing more Shockwaves than cases."
In the fellowship thread I joked that I would start a sports fellowship, since basically anything can be a fellowship. By that same token, unless I'm missing something, anyone can be a sports medicine specialist if that's how they want to market themselves. So what am I missing?
news.uthscsa.edu
