Mr Benedict Khoo

Benedict has practised in Singapore since 2017, and that time has given him a broad view of what walks through the door in this climate and this culture. Office workers whose shoes are half a size too narrow. People who spend five days a week in heels and the weekend regretting it. Runners training on hard pavement in high humidity. Older patients who have not been able to reach their own toenails in years. Teenagers whose ingrown nails have been trimmed at home one too many times.

Skin and nail conditions form a large part of his weekly caseload. He manages fungal nail infections at high volume, which matters because they are commonly misdiagnosed, slow to respond, and frequently self-treated with pharmacy products for months before anyone confirms what the organism actually is. He works regularly with PACT antifungal therapy, a light-activated treatment applied in clinic, alongside debridement and topical management. He also manages ingrown toenails, most often with Partial nail avulsion, a minimally invasive procedure that removes only the offending border of the nail rather than the whole plate. Nail surgery has been a steady part of his week since 2017, amounting to well over a thousand procedures.

For skin conditions, warts come up often in Benedict’s week, and they are frequently mistaken for something else. Many patients arrive having treated one as a corn for months, or having worked through a series of pharmacy products that were never going to touch it. He starts by establishing what the lesion actually is, then matches the treatment to it and to what the patient can realistically keep up with.

Alongside the skin and nail work, Benedict manages musculoskeletal foot and ankle problems, such as heel pain and plantar fasciitis, Achilles and other tendon complaints that often turn out to start further down.

Working out what is loading the tissue comes before deciding what to do about it, since the same heel pain can come from training error, footwear, foot structure, or something that is not the heel at all. Benedict puts most of his effort into that stage, because a plan built on the wrong cause tends to fail slowly rather than obviously, and a patient can spend months on it before anyone questions the premise. He would rather revisit a plan that is not working than keep going with it, and he says so at the first appointment.

Benedict’s interest in the more advanced end of podiatry traces back to his own injuries. When his flat feet caused problems during National Service, nobody gave him much to work with. He was told to rest, or to push through, and beyond that he was left googling and asking around, which produced a great deal of contradictory advice and no clear direction. He found the middle ground thin, and filling in that gap is what most of his additional training has gone into since: treatments that do real work on tissue without an operation.

He is a Certified Medical Shockwave Practitioner with the International Society of Medical Shockwave Treatment, having completed the certification in New Zealand in 2018, when the qualification was still uncommon across the region. He works with focused shockwave and radial pressure wave therapy for tendon and fascial problems that have not settled with load management alone.

He is also certified in point-of-care lower limb ultrasound, which he uses alongside clinical examination rather than in place of formal imaging. It is useful for aiding what a hands-on assessment already suggests, and for judging when something warrants a proper scan and a referral. He is a certified prescriber for ankle-foot orthoses (QOL) and supramalleolar orthoses (Surestep), and is certified in sports taping application.

Benedict has served as a clinical supervisor to junior podiatrists, taking newer clinicians through case management and building their confidence with procedures that are difficult to learn from a textbook. Nail surgery in particular is a technique most podiatrists are taught once and then have to develop properly in practice, usually on patients who are already anxious about it.

In July 2023 he delivered a Healthway continuing medical education webinar on paediatric toe walking, and in 2025 he presented at the Healthway Medical Group Annual Scientific Meeting on common foot lesions in podiatric practice, covering warts, calluses, corns and fungal infections, to an audience of doctors and clinicians from across the group.