A long time ago I met a podiatrist named Dr. Goad who practiced at Scott & White in Temple at the children's hospital. I may be butchering the story, but he told me something resembling the following.
He decided he wanted to focus on pediatrics. I believe he sought out pediatric type mentors. I'm under the impression there was a podiatrist associated with Scholl or in Chicago who had a heavy pediatric focus and he might have been one of the people he spoke to. Anyway, my memory is he started building a pediatric practice, but he was still about 50% adult. The advice he was given was that no one would take him seriously as a person pursuing pediatrics if he still saw adults. This was somewhat problematic because this represented quite a bit of his income. However, he ultimately dropped all of his adults and pursued pure pediatrics and the rest was history. Slightly complicated this story is that I believe another attending at the program told me that to support Dr. Goad's practice some of the other podiatrists purposely saw less pediatrics so that Goad's practice would have more patients. He had a very full entirely pediatric practice and it wasn't just teenagers - he saw young children to including unusual complicated neuromuscular disorders.
I spent a week with him. He was very nice and very interested in clubfoot. I saw more clubfoot with him in a week then I've seen in the rest of my training or career. Did quite a bit of casting and what not. I would not have described the week as incredibly surgical though other than nail surgery.
There's a "pediatric guru" who is up in the northeast that I've seen speak before. His entire business model appeared to be shamefully hardselling patients on orthotics for their kids by telling parents that if they don't buy orthotics for their kids then the kids will have feet like their parents.
Young people are interesting patients. They heal well. I've seen a metatarsal fracture heal on a child in like a week. There can be weird aspects to their stories like when you ultimately parse that the child's fracture was caused by their foot being hit by a brick that their parent threw. They can at times be bitchy and ungrateful ie. teenagers having flatfoot surgery. In most of medicine - pediatric doctors make less money because Medicaid is such a poor source of reimbursement. I personally enjoy treating the most common pediatric issues - ingrown toenails, calcaneal apophysitis, equinus, bunions, and flatfeet.
Pediatric ortho where I am is heavily focused on spinal deformities.
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