Podiatry and region specificity

[SouthernPod]

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Have a bit of a dumb question: Is podiatry, as a profession, more prominent in the Northern states? For starters, most of the schools are up North, and a lot of the big office web cites are from up North or even out West. I plan on setting up practice one day in the TN/KY area but there doesn't appear to be a lot of big practices in the area. Thanks for your input.

 

[Feli]

Most of the states with the best DPM scope of practice are actually in the southern US (Georgia, Fla, Cali), and podiatry does just fine almost anywhere. Yes, there are places like Montana, South Carolina, Idaho, etc where pods are probably few and far between, but that's just because people and in general and specialists of any kind are sparsely populating those states. Those are usually also some of the few states that don't have even a single pod residency, and a lot of DPMs practice where they did their residency (at least for a while).

Tenn and KY don't have a lot of practices because there just aren't a lot of people there. Also, there's only one pod residency in each of those states (KPRP and Mountain Home). KPRP is supposed to be pretty stellar, but I've heard uh... mixed reviews on DVA - Tenn.

 

[SouthernPod]

lol, thanks Feli. Anyone else?

 

[APMAHelp]

According to the most recent APMA practice survey, 26% of podiatric physicians practice in the Northeast, 26% in the Midwest, 29% in the South and 19% in the West. As you can see, that's a pretty even distribution. Most of the respondents to the survey (81%) practice in either an urban or suburban area.

It should also be noted that many podiatric physicians practice in one of the eight states where there are colleges of podiatric medicine located. Currently, APMA is doing a workforce study of podiatric medicine to determine where the areas of greatest need are and will be in the future.