The APMA should sell tickets to the upcoming house of delegates meeting.  Or sell broadcast rights.  It’s going to be a doozy, as finally the membership realizes the past and present incompetency of the leadership.  When your own hired consultants conclude that you are the blame, the end is near.

Podiatry is now a decentralized profession without a central core.  Almost 2,000 attended ACFAS two weeks ago.  Why ?  Because ACFAS has effectively replaced the APMA as its core.  As the Barry Block generation dies off, so too is the APMA.  People are quitting, people not joining.  You are forced to join the APMA if you wish to join your local society.  If this tithing were not “the rule”, most members would tell the APMA what the USMLE told them, screw off you undereducated twits.

As of this writing, there are less than 600 applicants to the 10 podiatry schools.  Less than 600.  That’s an average of 60 applicants per school.  It’s time for podiatry to enter hospice care.  Last rites are not far ahead.  And Lawrence Harkless is adding yet another school.  Just what do you envision will therefore be accepted into colleges ?  An average GPA of 3.9 ?   A top 5% MCAT performer ?  An Ivy League graduate ?

There is no central core.  Residents run around at the local level searching for cases where they can find them.  The diversity and lack of educational standardization in podiatry’s non-ACGME “residencies” is frightening to consider.  Everything is local, with no true central regulation, only a nod and wink from CPME, ABFAS, ACFAS, ABPM and all the other for nothing but meet podiatric guarantors of quality programs to protect the public.

There is no central core.  Every week there are 2,3,4 podiatry seminars run by who knows whom or some phony organization claiming to be education motivated.  And podiatrists sign up by the hundreds.  Lectures on quack theories, hucksters selling medications or devices of unproven efficacy, more excuses to perform unneeded surgery, needlessly expensive wound care products, or unnecessarily expensive fixation devices are the rule.  Oh, and coding.  Lots of that.

There is no central core.  Each state functions in its own manner with differing scopes of practice and an eclectic non-cooperative array of requirements for licensure and licensure maintenance.

There is no central core.  The “profession” tolerates, accepts, encourages a vast array of pseudo-board certifications which those holding memberships as you know are fraudulent misrepresentations.

There is no central core.  If you are a reader, look at foot and ankle research published each month.  The articles published are 100-1

orthopedic authored.

You have individual podiatrists making beau coup bucks.  Others not doing well at all.  No consistency.  Toenails to tibia.

No leadership.  No consistency or reliability in college curriculum, residency training, post graduate education, scope of practice, income production. 

And as a result no one is applying to be a podiatrist.

Time to buy a grave plot, coffin, and make the necessary arrangements.  Sorry all you APMA parasites, you have killed your host organism.