Sam,
Thanks for your engagement. You seem like a nice guy, and much of what we've brought up are things that are beyond the aim of your current project. But there are certain "open secrets" that the profession of podiatry will not address:
1) Many students matriculate into the P1 class and many flunk out.
2) APMLE step 1 first time pass rates are abysmal. Samuel Merrit University (in San Francisco) had a 69% pass rate one year, for which we have named them the SMU 69ers
3) Many residencies are overreporting surgical numbers. To say that you graduated from a PMSR/RRA residency could mean a lot of things, you could be one of our elites or you could be better off sitting in the corner playing with crayons. There is a vast disparity in training but everyone is incentivized to do nothing about it.
4) You'll be able to tell us how accurate I'm being now, but podiatry is still by my observation a private practice dominated profession. I don't think the implications of this are adequately explained to prehealth students. Your reimbursements are worse, your benefits are worse, your time off is worse, you spend much of your day doing non-podiatry things. Hence the allusion to "crappy private-practice jobs."
5) The attraction of #4 is if you can hire other doctors to work under you and generate income for you. Hence creating the unsavory predatory owner-associate relationships we decry on this forum. Many podiatrists use their practice as their retirement plan: work at it, build it, sell it, then retire, with the expectation that the next generation of DPMs will do the same. As with all ponzi schemes, this will eventually collapse leaving a generation of bag-holders.
6) The lack of mobility. If your circumstances change, or if you're unhappy with your current job, any move puts you squarely at the bottom of the totem pole again.
7) On the subject of "using our training," this alludes to the differential between what we're trained for vs what the market actually demands. We're told there is an onslaught of elderly diabetics on the horizon who will have foot problems. "Foot problems," it turns out means "overgrown toenails." You simply do not need to undertake a 7 year course of postgraduate education and training to clip toenails, and it is only a matter of time before society figures this out. We market to pre-health students that podiatry is a fast track into surgery, and I find this gravely unethical. I'm not anti podiatry, I'm just anti lying to 20 year olds.
For further edification, please consult the 92 page thread "Memes of Podiatry"
