Last month I had the opportunity to attend a foot surgery seminar in Bordeaux, France. I know you are probably thinking this involved sampling great food, tasting famous wines and visiting all the sights. Of course, you are right. But I also attended a first rate seminar as well.

I do not speak French and I had some trepidation before I left about how I would be received. I am delighted to say that everyone I met on this trip was kind, wonderful and generous. I can only fault them for their inability to say "I don’t know" when confronted with an unfamiliar address. Almost every person of whom I asked directions pointed me the wrong way. Nevertheless I still admired them for doing it with the assurance and elegance only the French have mastered. It also gave me the opportunity for a little extra sightseeing.

The seminar was jointly sponsored by the American College of Foot Surgeons, of which I am a member, and the French Orthopedic Society. There were foot surgeons from the United States and a dozen countries of Europe. The lectures were in either English or French. When a talk was in French, the English speakers would hear a simultaneous translation on headphones. The translators were very good at getting across most of the ideas as fast as a native born speaker can talk. Language problems still arose. In our headphones we would hear a translator with a heavy British accent apologize that they were having trouble understanding French spoken with a heavy Spanish accent.

Among my impressions about my European colleagues, besides their hospitality, is the diversity of their surgical techniques, the length of hospitalizations for foot surgery and how much they smoked. European physicians almost all smoke. We spent Friday afternoon at the Bordeaux medical school anatomy laboratory practicing new surgical techniques. The Americans could be found at the tables working with saws and drills. The Europeans were at the periphery of the room, cigarette in hand, talking about the procedures. The mixture of formaldehyde and tobacco smoke inside a room with poor ventilation on a rainy humid day was dreadful. You have to be tough to be a European doctor.

Every European country represented at this conference had a national health insurance plan. Despite this centralized control it is not unusual for patients having bunion, heel or toe surgery to stay in the hospital for three, five or even seven days. They were surprised to learn that these procedures are routinely done as an out-patient surgery in the States. One Portuguese surgeon was not even familiar with the concept of same day surgery.

I was well-acquainted with most of the techniques presented by the Americans. In the States foot surgery is performed quite similarly across the country. European surgical technique is more diverse. Some surgeons lectured on techniques that we discarded years ago because of high complication rates. Others discussed techniques that are so radical in approach that American doctors would be hesitant to even try them. It was refreshing to see how the problems American foot surgeons see on a daily basis are approached by surgeons from other countries.

This seminar was a great educational experience. I learned a lot about foot surgery, not to trust French directions and the relative merits of Medoc versus St. Emilion wines (its the amount of Merlot). What more could you want from a seminar?

Dr. Michael Zapf is a board certified podiatrist with offices in Agoura and Thousand Oaks. For more information you can call his office at (818) 707-3668. Oui!