“Surgery of the Foot and Ankle incorporates the skills, insights, techniques, knowledge, and deep understanding of the best orthopaedic surgeons in the world and makes it available to everyone.” – Dr. Charles Saltzman
Medicine is a wonderful field. I had always wanted to actually be in it, and be part of helping others in a way that’s meaningful and allows me to get to know other people and feel like I’m contributing. Orthopaedics is particularly good for me because I’ve got a mechanical mind and I like working on mechanical problems. I also like my patients to get better and, unlike other fields of medicine, when you intervene in orthopaedics you can often make a patient markedly better. Foot and ankle is an especially complicated area, I’ve found. My co-editor on Surgery of the Foot and Ankle, Michael Coughlin, entered at a time when there was a real need for a tremendous change and improvement, and we became part of that. It has been incredible.
Surgery of the Foot and Ankle incorporates the skills, insights, techniques, knowledge, and deep understanding of the best orthopaedic surgeons in the world and makes it available to everyone. The book has been successful in the past and has now become a multi-authored and internationally-authored work that relates to everything we’re currently doing in the field of orthopaedics.
We finished the last edition just six years ago and since then there has been a continuous explosion of new information in every area of foot and ankle surgery. We’ve embedded a lot of new technology and techniques in Surgery of the Foot and Ankle. For example, there has been an explosion in information about foot and ankle replacements. In the next edition, there will be a chapter devoted solely to that, as well as five videos showing different approaches to total ankle replacement. We will have a lot of information on revisions of ankle replacements, too. There’s been a good deal of new work done using arthroscopy around the foot and ankle for evaluating tendons, thus doing smaller procedures using smaller instruments. We’re getting into joints that we’d never done before and developing new ways to treat problems that had heretofore been very difficult. That’s just a small sampling of the technical expanse of the new technologies in the book. That’s why we needed to do a new edition. We felt we had to do it—that it was time.
Biography
Charles Saltzman, MD serves as professor and chair of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Utah. He is an established academic physician with a special interest in ankle arthroplasty and ankle reconstruction. He has authored more than 140 peer-reviewed publications, 30 book chapters, and has co-edited three textbooks, including the eighth edition of Surgery of the Foot and Ankle.
Dr. Saltzman has served as chairman of the managerial board for Foot and Ankle International, vice president of the International Federation of Foot and Ankle Societies, treasurer of the Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons and treasurer for the Managerial Board of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.
Dr. Saltzman has also held leadership posts with the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society and an Honorary Member of the British Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society. He completed his medical education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, his residency at the University of Michigan, and a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic.
Related Authors: Michael Coughlin, MD
