Dr. David Watts is not the kind of plastic surgeon you might see on TV — he doesn’t do tummy tucks or nose jobs. He does, however, reconstruct damaged, cracked feet.
His medical career is full of diverse and impressive accomplishments. For years, Dr. Watts worked alongside renowned neurosurgeon and former Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson at Johns Hopkins Hospital. When Dr. Carson, who was particularly known for brain operations on children, would finish a surgery, Dr. Watts would step in. As an expert on healing wounds and trauma to the skin, Dr. Watts made sure the children all healed properly and were able to live a full and healthy life. It was some of the most rewarding work of his life, Dr. Watts said.
Treating the Cracked Feet of Our Veterans
Dr. Watts also spent 12 years in the U.S. Army reserves, eventually reaching the rank of Major before becoming one of the top plastic surgeons at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. There, he saw many veterans — especially older ones that served in WWII or Vietnam — with terrible and painful feet problems.
While serving in the military, veterans spent many hours on their feet and often wore the standard issue military boots, which are not great for the feet in general. As a result, his skills as an expert reconstructive surgeon were in high demand.
“Ugly feet is not just a cosmetic issue anymore, it can be a devastating medical problem that can lead to just terrible, terrible outcomes,” Dr. Watts said. “Ones that can end up landing you in the hospital or to surgery.”
At first glance, this may not seem like a major problem — just simply a cosmetic issue. But cracked feet can lead to serious infections that could spread through the rest of the body. In those severe cases, amputation is often the only option.
Veterans are far from the only people who struggle with foot issues — nurses, waiters, police officers and any other profession that require a lot of standing and moving can lead to these problems. Also, the elderly, people who struggle with diabetes and obese people many times develop painful and sometimes devastating foot problems.
Finding a Better Alternative to Surgery
Dr. Watts, who believes it’s better to avoid operation when possible, knew that he had to find a better alternative that could prevent surgery.
“Could we come up with a way to heal damaged feet BEFORE they get to this point, so nobody needs to suffer from these surgeries ever again?” Dr. Watts asked himself.
It was quite a lofty goal, but after his years of helping patients deal with painful and dangerous foot issues, he was determined.
Most of his early research yielded poor results, and he had already tried most of the common, accepted medical techniques. Dr. Watts knew he had to try something that no one else had thought of before.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
Then Dr. Watts had a breakthrough — Human Growth Factor (HGF) could be used to help the foot regenerate healthy skin. HGF is a component made inside the body by the kidneys that increases skin regeneration and helps wound healing. Babies and children have a lot of HGF, which is why they don’t have wrinkles, but as people get older they have less and with less HGF and dry skin develops.
All the available foot products, at the time, did not have HGF in it. However, Dr. Watts caught wind that Johnson & Johnson had figured out a way to harness Human Epidermal Growth Factor (HEGF), a specifically designed compound to heal damaged skin. Dr. Watts was able to snag a trial supply and used it with elderly patients who developed sores after being bed ridden. To his happy amazement, their sores healed in a matter of days.
At that moment, Dr. Watts knew that he had stumbled upon the cream he was looking for. He then gave it to patients with cracked feet and once again, to his utter amazement, the results were even better. In just a matter of weeks or even days, Dr. Watts saw the equivalent of years of healing.
“Once I figured out we had this [HEGF] and we could use it, it was like a light bulb went off,” Dr. Watts said.
If only Dr. Watts could get a product that used this component to the masses, people could treat their severe foot problems at home and could even avoid possibly undergoing invasive surgery.
Making His Breakthrough Affordable
Unfortunately, that’s when Dr. Watts realized that it was a patented form of human epidermal growth factor that would cost patients about 375 dollars per ounce to purchase — a steep price most people could not afford.
But never one to give up, Dr. Watts wondered if he could create a new, affordable form of the skin healing component that would not encroach on the patent. He exhausted all his contacts and resources in the medical world, until he found molecular biologist Dr. Ma in Hong Kong, who had been working on making human compound from scratch using synthesized recombinant DNA.
It met all of Dr. Watts’s standards — it was ethical, high purity, had better results than normal human growth factor and best of all, it was affordable.
“We just needed to find a way to concentrate it [HGF] and basically to turbo charge it,” Dr. Watts said.
FootMedix is Born
Dr. Watts went to work on his first trial batch his foot cream. He then used it on his veteran patients at the VA hospital, whose feet were in particularly bad shape. The results even surpassed Dr. Watts’s highest expectations — as soon as the cream was administered, feet that were ashy and gray began to look pink and healthy, creating a “vascular flush.”
Dr. Watts’s cream FoodMedix was born.
What made FootMedix so successful was not only HGF, but the additional combination of tea tree oil, shea butter, beta-glucan and dimethicone — a combination that’s never been done before. Together these ingredients worked synergistically and had better benefits together than on their own.
Dr. Watts and his staff of nurses found another surprising use for FootMedix — as a restorative hand cream. Dr. Watts and his nurses, like many surgeons, wash their hands vigorously before and after an operation, which leaves their skin dry and cracked. A dab of FootMedix, they discovered, worked better than any lotion to restore their hands.
Danielle Tarasiuk is a multimedia journalist based in Los Angeles. Her work has been published on AllDay.com, Yahoo! Sports, KCET, and NPR-affiliate stations KPCC and KCRW. She’s a proud Sarah Lawrence College and USC Annenberg alumn.
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