It has been an honor to contribute to the Foot and Ankle Quarterly journal. When asked to choose a focus for this issue, I paused only for a moment before suggesting that the practice of podiatric medicine with geriatric patients would be a topic of great importance for readers.

I have been around podiatry long enough to witness how social change and advances in podiatric education and surgery form an interconnected web of expertise that’s normalized podiatrists’ roles in primary medicine. This, for many reasons, couldn’t have been envisioned a few decades ago.

In the 1970s, podiatrists became sports medicine physicians, answering the needs of the hundreds of thousands of new and seasoned runners and other athletes. In the 1980s and beyond, as the epidemic of diabetes was fully manifested, podiatrists again joined in battling a complex medical challenge, developing foundational research on the diabetic limb and becoming the physicians most responsible for limb and life-saving treatments for millions of wounded and amputated patients.

Today, we face a new demographic challenge: the rise of the geriatric population – a cohort which is often affected by not only diabetes, but the complex set of co-morbidities and expectations that can accompany it. There is an ever-increasing hope (if not a certainty) that function, mobility, activity and recreation can and should be maintained and enhanced well into the seventh and eighth decades of life.

The data is clear – a sedentary lifestyle kills. Sitting is the new smoking. To whom will those who have trouble staying on their feet turn? Who can enhance and promote pain-free ambulation? Who can apply surgical and non-surgical methods to resolve dermatologic, mechanical and orthopaedic pathologies that stifle daily activities of living? And, who can impact the rising statistics related to falling, from which consequences can be so grave? This issue is devoted to answering these questions and exploring the ways that podiatrists’ roles are expanding in improving the quality and duration of patients’ lives.

I would like to thank my many gifted colleagues and associates at the New York College of Podiatric Medicine for their perspectives and time contributed to this work.

Robert A. Eckles, DPM, MPH