Tooele County’s newest podiatrist has wasted no time settling in to the community — just days after he moved to the area, Jeff Carlson, DPM visited the Tooele Arts Festival to purchase art for his office.
Although Carlson did his undergraduate work at Brigham Young University and his residency in Salt Lake City, the podiatrist and his family are new to the Tooele area. But within days of moving into their new home, he said his wife began joking that “their next move would be to the Tooele City Cemetery.”
Both Carlson and his wife grew up in small towns — he in Alaska, where his father was a general practitioner, and she in Oregon. The availability of a job at the Tooele Medical Group Foot and Ankle Clinic, as well as Tooele’s small town, community atmosphere, made his new position a perfect fit, he said.
Because of his strong belief in being involved in his community, Carlson has already jumped into local health events with both feet, offering free exams at the Tooele School District’s health fair, the Senior Expo, and other health-related events.
“That’s fun for me, to be out there, giving free advice,” he said.
Giving, as well as working directly with patients, is what Carlson said he enjoys most about his job and what ultimately inspired him to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the medical profession.
“The best thing is to see a patient come in the door limping, and have them walking normal on their way home,” he said.
But Carlson couldn’t see himself as a general practitioner like his father. He preferred to do something where he could become an expert, rather than skim the surface of a wide variety of medical specialties. After looking into multiple options and rejecting each one, Carlson said his father-in-law suggested he try podiatry.
“After looking at everything, that was it,” he said.
As a podiatrist, Carlson said he gets to experience the best of both medical worlds — the opportunity to work directly with patients during exams, as well as the challenge of surgery — without having to sacrifice his quality of life or family time.
He also has the chance to work in a field that could, in some respects, be considered cutting-edge. Just 20 years ago, he said, it was difficult to find enough experienced podiatrists to set up even a one-year residency.
The science of medicine is constantly changing, Carlson said, and even as a relative newcomer to the profession, he’s already seen some cases straight out of the medical journals — rare infections, arches so collapsed that the feet take on the shape of a rocker, and others.
But most of the time, he said, he spends his days fitting custom orthotics and healing patient’s heel pain.
Many of his patients live with pain for weeks or months on the assumption that a corrective procedure would require a long and difficult recovery, Carlson said. But that’s not always the case. Take the most common complaint his patients bring to him — heel pain. With risk factors such as suddenly increased activity, weight gain, and new footwear, heel pain is most common around the Christmas season, Carlson said, and is usually easy to treat.
“There’s no reason to have heel pain,” he said. “Ninety-eight percent of the time, I can get rid of heel pain in two weeks.”
Unfortunately, he said, many patients wait much longer than that, hoping perhaps to avoid a trip to the doctor before finally reporting to a specialist.
His free advice of the day? If you have foot pain that lasts more than a week, set an appointment with your podiatrist.