More than ten years after selling my practice, I am still actively practicing podiatric medicine—just in a very different and, in many ways, more rewarding way.
I volunteer part-time (approximately 2 ½ days a week) at three charity clinics caring for homeless, uninsured, underserved, and marginalized patients. I jokingly call it my “retirement dream job.” There are no pre-certs, no payroll, no productivity quotas, and no financial agenda. There is simply a patient who needs help and an opportunity to use what I have learned over a lifetime to provide it.
I have been fortunate to stand on the shoulders of wonderful mentors—Drs. Russell Seaburger, Hy Rosenfeld, Bill Ross, Bernard Hirsch, and many others. They taught me that what we learn during a lifetime in medicine should not end with us; we have an obligation to pass it forward.
Throughout my career, I’ve welcomed preceptors, students, and residents into my offices. In retirement, mentoring the next generation has become an especially meaningful part of staying active and feeling like I have a real purpose.
At 82, when many of my colleagues are no longer walking this earth or whose friends have co-morbidities, when I’m in my clinic, I feel energized with my “mojo still a workin.’” Today’s podiatric medical students receive medical and surgical training that my generation could hardly have imagined. But some things cannot be learned from a textbook or lecture.
How do you reassure a frightened diabetic patient? How do you earn the trust of someone living on the street who may be accustomed to being treated with indifference? How do you connect with a patient by touching their foot or leg instead of concentrating on a laptop, helping them onto the examination table, looking them in the eye, or simply showing them respect by apologizing when you have kept them waiting?
And there is still much to be learned from the everyday conditions that constitute the bread and butter of podiatric practice—mycotic nails, painful calluses and corns, heel pain, deformities, shoe problems, and diabetic wounds. Properly treating these seemingly routine problems can relieve pain, preserve mobility, and in the diabetic patient, sometimes prevent the complications that lead to amputation.
At this stage of my life, I am not trying to teach the latest reconstructive foot and ankle surgery. Younger colleagues can do that far better than I can. What I can share are lessons accumulated over more than half a century: clinical judgment, common sense, mistakes made (and learned from), patient interaction, and perhaps most importantly, the understanding that we treat a person, not simply a foot. One of the mantras passed on to me was, “Patients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Retirement has given me the freedom to practice that philosophy without an agenda. I can spend time with a patient because that patient needs my time. I can teach because I want the next generation to benefit from what my mentors taught me. And I can go home knowing that perhaps someone who had nowhere else to turn is walking with a little less pain and a little more dignity (and a free pair of donated shoes and socks).
Yes, my generation enjoyed what might be called the “golden age of reimbursement.” But today’s young podiatrists possess medical and surgical training we could only have dreamed of. Perhaps those of us who came before them can contribute something in return—the wisdom that only comes from years of caring for patients.
My mentors allowed me to stand on their shoulders. One of the greatest privileges of retirement is now being able to offer my shoulders to the next generation.
—David S. Wolf, DPM, Retired