Partial Removal of Leg Bone

Welcome to OrthoIllinois and thank you for entrusting me with your foot & ankle care!

I’d like to offer some insight into my patient care philosophy and the path that brought me to become a foot and ankle podiatric surgeon.

The foundation of my patient care begins with compassion and a desire to engage the emotional, mental, and physical state patients are experiencing at the time they seek care. I know that each patient is much more than their foot or ankle problem; they have a life and a lifestyle impeded by their specific injury or condition. Understanding a patient’s background and goals for recovery helps me as a caregiver to better ensure patients feel heard and remain active participants in their treatment plan.

Growing up, my grandfather and uncle were dentists and the exposure to their practices initiated my interest in medicine. It wasn’t until I experienced my own ankle injury as a high school sophomore in Wisconsin, keeping me out of our team’s state hockey championship, that I understood the impact of physical injury and the physician/patient relationship. Amidst my collegiate hockey career, I had the opportunity to further interact with team physicians and surgeons and realized my vocational interest was in having the capacity to help people, especially athletes, with acute injuries and other problems that affected their daily life.

Becoming a surgeon has been a perfect fit, drawing on my natural enjoyment of working with my hands and the satisfaction of being able to fix problems. People need their lower extremities every step they take, and the specialty of foot and ankle allows me to help patients maintain or regain the quality of life and level of activity they desire.

In my foot and ankle practice I treat traumatic injuries as well as congenital and degenerative conditions. Sports injuries, trauma, and foot/ankle reconstruction have been of special interest to me my entire career. I do my best to utilize state-of-the-art conservative and non-surgical methods as my first approach. Only after conservative intervention has been exhausted do I engage the patient in discussion for best practices in surgical care. Whether treating conservatively or surgically it is important to me that the patient understands their condition as well as their treatment recommendations, so they are fully involved and engaged in the treatment journey and recovery processes.

I look forward to working with you to help you successfully return to quality of life you desire and activities you enjoy!

Sincerely,
Matt Sorensen, DPM, FACFAS