Course History

My name is John Feulner.  Over the years, just like any practitioner I have had my ups and downs with respect to foot orthotics.   I am a Podiatrist, an ABC Certified Orthotist, and at one time I was also a Certified Athletic Trainer and a Certified Pedorthist. Ever since podiatry school, I have been very interested and somewhat fascinated with what can be achieved with foot orthotics.  I made my first pair of orthotics at the NYCPM in 1993 and since then I have personally fabricated tens of thousands of pairs of orthotics as well as dispensed thousands of pairs of orthotics directly to patients. 

With all of that orthotic experience, until a few years ago I still had questions and like many practitioners, I did not always know with a very high certainty how well the orthotics that I dispensed would ultimately work or if the adjustments I made was really going to address and handle their complaint. Things plagued me like casting three people with the same diagnosis, similar body and foot types and then getting three very different results. 

Why couldn’t I get a great result with a particular patient with a seemingly simple problem?

These are the patients that you ultimately spend more time with and usually, they are also the ones who never seem to be happy with your efforts or ultimately with your orthotics.  

My goal was a simple one; to be bullet-proof with respect to orthotics. I wanted to have all the answers and I wanted to know with certainty exactly what to do in any given situation that would improve my patient’s condition and directly address their chief complaint. 

I have achieved this. I no longer have any unanswered questions with respect to the application of what we call practical biomechanics and foot orthotics.  

I have now put all this information into a course. The material for this course is the result of decades of hard-won experience by my partner Bob Levine and myself.

It’s been a circuitous and somewhat bumpy road we took, but we found the answers and solutions to the questions and problems that we both asked and were confronted with.

Much of this information simply did not exist. The worlds of medicine and surgery have made great strides in recent decades. Biomechanics and orthotics have been relegated to the back burner if not taken off the stove all together.   

To give you a brief overview:

1. The biomechanics that we learned in school was not practical. It did not translate directly into making orthotics work better or more consistently.
   
   
2. Almost every practitioner I have spoken to said they “always found the subject of biomechanics confusing.” This is a direct indication that it was never a practical subject or had practical applications in today’s practice setting.
   
   
3. We have developed a quick, easy and accurate method of assessing any given patient’s mechanics. Assessing your patient’s mechanics is very necessary to doing large volumes of orthotics.  More importantly, it’s necessary to get consistently stellar results.  It is in fact the stellar results that drive the machine -- as in getting second and third pair requests and getting direct referrals from your orthotic patients. 
   
   
4. Doing orthotics can be as precise, as efficacious and as rewarding as anything else you do in practice. In fact, isn’t it true that the majority of everything that we are presented with in our practices ultimately has a mechanical etiology? When you can accurately assess your patient’s mechanics and you know exactly what to do to make those mechanics more optimally symmetrical and stable, you become a more effective practitioner. You now directly address the etiology and not just the symptom that they present with.        

One way to describe what we do with our courses at DPM Practice Solutions is “we take the guess work out of orthotics.”

Case in point, when you dispense a pair of orthotics, do you know exactly or with great certainty how the patient will ultimately do with them? If the patient has a complaint after dispense, do you have the exact remedy that will address that complaint or do you find yourself like many practitioners saying “we will try this and I’ll see you back in two weeks to see how it went”?  Or even worse, do you have to send them back to the lab and then get them back a few weeks later and then have to say “we’ll try this and I’ll see you back in two weeks to see how it went”?

The point here is that you certainly would not stand for or tolerate any of that type of confusion, uncertainty or inconsistent results if you were dealing with an infection or an ulcer, and certainly none of those things come into the equation when you do surgery - so why do we tolerate these things when it comes to orthotics? 

It all comes down to results. Your ability to assess your patient’s mechanics makes the difference between failure, good results and results that exceed your patient’s expectations.  We can teach anyone who wishes, to become completely confident with biomechanics and orthotics. Our course covers all that you need to know to do large numbers of orthotics and getting consistently great results to boot. Knowing this material is great for your patient base as it makes you a more effective practitioner and at the same time it is a great source of income for your practice.

The Advanced Course►