The Importance of Research in Podiatric Medicine and Surgery

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Transcript

Hi, I'm Dr. Windy Cole. I'm the Director of Wound Care Research at Kent State University College of Podiatric Medicine. Well, this is a call to action to all my podiatric colleagues. You know, I started out in general podiatry, had two offices and then started working in wound care and I had so many questions. I think all it really takes to get into research is to have questions, just to have an inquisitive mind. And you know, as podiatrists, we are the diabetic foot experts. So, we should really be running with a torch and generating evidence that will help form best practices for our colleagues.

I think we could do a whole lot better as a field and evidence-based medicine is imperative in wound care and in podiatry. So, I think we really should play a role in that evidence generation. So, I think simply having a question, if you see a patient that has an interesting presentation and you just don't know what to do and you look at it, okay, what options do I have, what could work for this patient, or you find a new product that comes into the ether, and you're curious about that, that's really where you start. And 20 years ago, that's how I started, I used an interesting technology, I had a good result on a patient, and I wrote a poster. And I submitted it to SAWC, and 20 years later, I have seven posters right now at SAWC, and so many publications as well. So I think that's where you start, and you can develop case series out of those cases and really become an expert in whatever field, if it's sports medicine, wound care, podiatric surgery, surgical site infection prevention, whatever the case may be. I think you could really start simple. Then if you're interested in getting into high level data and looking at randomized controlled trials or multi-center case series or case studies, you can develop a staff that can work with you. So, it's team sport, really, and you need to have a good clinical research assistant if you're going to do those higher level sort of projects, but you don't have to start there. You start a single case or, you know, a few cases of interesting presentation or interesting utilization of a product in the first, you know, dual poster and that's a great place to start.