The term "Chiropodist" was coined in 1785, but not used by our profession in the US until the early 1900's. Felix Von Defele was the first one to use the term "Podiatrist" in 1918, however this was resisted by many both in and outside the profession. For the next 40 years we were referred to as both, and it wasn't until 1958 that the profession officially changed the title, and soon after the degree changed too.
The main reason behind the name change was to avoid public and professional confusion with chiropractors. "Allopathic medicine" as we know it today had a lot of competition from both osteopaths and chiropractors back then, as both professions claimed to treat systemic diseases. While the allopathic community put all efforts to dismiss and discredit those professions, podiatry was largely ignored, mainly because they thought of the foot as a non-vital organ.
In reality we weren't trying to imitate any other profession with our degree and title changes, we were trying to do just the opposite. If you look at the history of podiatry, the degree change did little to advance our profession; if anything it deflected attention away from us long enough to organize and establish ourselves as a separate branch of medicine without resistance. Likewise, the leaps and bounds we've made since that time to parallel allopathic medicine came as a result of improving our education, state legislation, and professional relationships with the allopathic community. The more we're educated about general medicine and better we practice, the greater respect we'll receive from our patients and peers. This is why we need a progressive education, not a degree change.
We are a profession in-limbo, but we're slowly progressing through our hard work. The last thing we need is to confuse people with more semantics. We should focus our efforts on improving the aspects of our professional and educational system that are not on par with general medicine. We have a sub-par general medicine education (by our own admission, as well as that of the allopathic community), many governing boards, surgical and non-surgical podiatrists, and non-unified state scopes. None of these issues will be addressed by a degree change, nor will we receive additional "clout" from our peers or patients with such.
As was just mentioned, according to published research, a majority of patients already believe we have a medical degree. The best thing we can do to achieve parity is expand our education and relationships with the public and allopathic peers. We can call ourselves anything we want, but if we don't have the substance we're not going to be taken seriously as health care providers.
GSR
