I think the choice is the number one thing we have in this country.
Becoming a doctor, it was a decision I made the age of 13. I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, but did not have a choice. Hmm, I came to America to have the choice. Dr. Armin Hagobjanian is a foot in ankle surgeon, educator, and the founder and CEO of the Los Angeles Institute of Foot in Ankle Surgery.
He helps patients restore mobility and quality of life through advanced reconstructive procedures, while training surgeons to perform some of the most complex foot in ankle surgeries in the field. We know artificial intelligence can't replace your relationship, your human relationship with the patient.
“That's what my approach to it. Use it as a tool.”
Let artificial intelligence gather some database, pull up some information,
help you to be a better doctor, but never rely on that artificial intelligence
to make the decision what needs to be done for the patient. It's still needs to be a human decision. People who want to get into the medical field right now today in 2026. What is your biggest piece of advice for them? Am I a device to you guys? It's true.
The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. Open, check how much the lead you send. It's the process now on the planet. You can live your dreams. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Living Your Legacy Podcast.
I'm your host for today, Jason Tyler, and I am joined by Dr. Armin Huggup-Junyan. I got the pronunciation right now. We've got it so right. Yes.
You almost like an Arminyan.
“Well, we're not there yet, but I'll get there eventually, but Armin or Dr. Armin,”
how are you feeling today? I'm feeling great. Thank you for asking. Thank you for joining us on the show. Now, you just got finished recording your episode for America's best doctors.
First of all, how are you feeling now on the other side of it? Is it like relief?
No, I think it's actually more work because after the finish out of the story, both of the guys who were filming me asked me to see a look at the ankles, because they bought had some problems. So I think they called me here for the reason to be treated for the flu. Well, we're going to make it three, because I have a bad ankle on this side too.
I used to do it. It's a good thing, I'm not the urologist, you know, and this is a good thing. I actually, I used to be a skateboarder, so I've broken this ankle like three times. That's right, this one's right at my alley. Kind of, kind of wonky, but we'll get, we'll get there eventually.
But I want to ask you, for the people out there in the audience that are going to be viewing your episode, what's like the number one lesson you want people to learn from your story?
“I think, check on your doctor, the most important part.”
We touched base about it in the interview, and many of the patients that come to me
were operated on by somebody else in the past, and I always asked them, I said,
"Well, how did you choose your doctor?" And they said, "Well, it was the very first doctor I saw and I decided to go with it." They said, "Listen, I mean, when you buy a car, you at least visit seven dealerships before you commit, right? And why do you just simply not go to a couple of more doctors to see if this is the right choice
for you?" I think the most important part is to check on the background of your doctor. For the experience, how many patients is done? There's a public record about how many legal cases are suggested, doctor. So choose your doctor from many carefully, and you will be in a better hands. To piggyback off of that, so I've done work with a couple of different guys from the MBA,
a couple of different ball players, and one of my good buddies is Viktor Oladipo. So Viktor had, he tore his ACL Manuscus in Indiana, had a surgery from a doctor that was recommended to him by the team in Indiana. And then when he got traded here to Miami, he basically got an MRI on his knee, and they were like, whoever did that surgery did not do a great job, and you're going to tear it again.
They told the exact quote that they gave him was, "You're basically running a formula one race in a used Toyota Camry." And so his whole thing was he didn't get to choose his doctor on that first surgery, and then he went, found a great physician down here. Miami got to redo the surgery, and now he's back up to being able to play again. But I wanted to get kind of your take, especially for, I don't know if you work too much with
athletes, but what is your take on like, when you work in an organization in a sports organization, an organization has like a relationship with a particular physician or a particular surgeon, how do you recommend for athletes out there to be able to still have a say in who's giving them treatment? I think the choice is the number one thing we have in this country. I think that was born and
Raised in the Soviet Union, but did not have a choice.
and it doesn't matter whether your team or your boss or your company is telling you who to see, I think the person, a basketball player, a simple gardener, or a regular employee, should have a choice. We have a lot of workers' competitions that are actually stuck in the system because they really cannot go anywhere they want to. They're stuck in a system with a doctor who needs to provide care because he has a contract with one or that company. So I'm sure
if that basketball player flew now, treated to Los Angeles, Los Angeles surgeons will do much better job. You might have done the doctor saying, Miami because I'm from Los Angeles, not the Miami. There's a little bit of bias there, I see it, I see it.
“Plus we have more trophies in Los Angeles than any Miami, that's why.”
I mean, I can't argue that. I can't argue that. I mean, I'm a huge basketball guy. The lakers are like one of my favorite teams of all time. So, well, I'll give it to you guys. You guys have me on that. Talk to me a little bit about your journey to becoming a doctor. What was it like going through? I mean, obviously coming to America, but what was it like kind of going through that system?
You know, becoming a doctor was a decision. I made the age of 13. I was caring for my very sick grandfather and seeing him going through a lot of trouble breathing and walking. It was kind of difficult thing to see. And when I started to couldn't get anywhere with the treatment he was provided, that time I decided to become a doctor. But it's not like, in the movies, you just decided to
become a doctor. The next thing you are wearing this white coat and you're doing a great job,
“it's a lot of work. You have to learn a lot. You have to have a great experience.”
Like, a no great director is born at the age of 17. You have to have some kind of a life experience before you become a great director. No great doctor can be great at the age of 20 because you need to do a lot of work to become great. You need to learn from mistakes of others. You need to learn from experience of others. So it's a very long journey and
the journey continues. You can never be at the top of the game and stay there. You have to
continuously improve yourself to life. You have to have some confidence in your journey. I'm so absolutely absolutely. Yeah, I'm a big proponent of that and my dad is a he's a psychologist and he's what we call in my family a forever student in that he will he's always he's never stopped taking college courses. Even now at the age of like 65 he's still taking courses for no reason really because he's practiced is doing no that is a reason there is a reason
because you always have to take classes to be on the top of the game. Even if you are teaching the class you're still learning from the students who ask you ask you the question.
“Very true. Absolutely. Very true. What do you have to say for aspiring people who want to get”
into the medical field right now today in 2026? What is your biggest piece of advice for them? I actually mentioned it in my interview. I was given a lecture to a group of young surgeons and I told them we told the changes in medicine and less and less money being contributed to the practice of medicine or to the doctors. My advice to you guys is to do a good job. We don't do surgery for money anymore. We do it for glory. So when you do the surgery just have fun because if you did the surgery
and you did not get paid for at least you had fun. When one of the older doctors raised the hands of the doctor, how come you didn't be careful? If the government was that you're having fun operating on their patients, they may start charging you for doing the work. So my advice is do medicine and go into medicine not because you expect a better lifestyle. There's no better
lifestyle in medicine because you're constantly on cold. There is always this new talk about life
to work balance. When you are a doctor, there is no a good balance towards life. There is more balance towards work because you're dealing with human beings and when they're in pain, when they're in need, they're going to call you and you have to answer. You can just say, listen, it's five o'clock. I'm done with my work call. It's more at seven when I'm back. Yeah, you're dealing with emergency situations, you're dealing with people who need a problem
solved right now and not in a few hours. That is correct. Yeah, I think, you know, with there's so much change happening around us constantly, especially nowadays. Things are, there's new technology. There's new, this, that, the third, everything is, you know, expanding very rapidly in society now. And it shouldn't lose ourselves in that technology. We should not just rely on
artificial intelligence that is really popular right now. You can never get artificial love.
You can never get artificial compassion.
You know, artificial intelligence can replace your relationship, your human relationship,
your bit of patient. How is artificial intelligence kind of being integrated into the medical system nowadays? I'm not really up on the information of how like the utilizing AI in that space. It's very rapid, rapid change like everywhere else, right? In the music industry, it can write a music in, I know, in medicine, it can actually read the exercise and analyze better than most radiologists can do in the endocrinology. It can pull out all the laboratory results
ahead of better analysis. But at the same time, it's just the tool that doctors should use.
“We should not rely on artificial intelligence making a decision. That's what my approach to it.”
Use it as a tool. Let artificial intelligence gather some database, pull up some
information, help you to be a better doctor, but never rely on that artificial intelligence
to make the decision what needs to be done for the patient. It's still wish to be a human decision. I love that take. I really think that kind of sums up this whole AI craze perfectly. It's a tool. We need to be able to utilize it as such without allowing it to influence our better decision making. When you're in, if you have any memories that jump out at you of times in the operating room that we're really impactful to you, what would you say is like
one of your most impactful operation room stories? Every operation is an interesting story by itself. You do not like your work in operating room to be exciting because it means there's a problem of a patient. You want it to be prepared for you or pause the routine. Absolutely. That's exactly what that is. Exactly. What it becomes exciting is there is something going on
“wrong. You have to re-adjust your plan. You have to make a decision on the spot and you need to”
make sure that you either saving a patient's life or the patient's leg. You do not want to be exciting in the operating room. You want it to be just routine. I think I want to have the biggest exception operating room if I see a better looking nurse that's home. Well, wouldn't it be an exciting
scenario in the operating room to have like, I always, I watch a lot of like fights. I watch a
lot of UFC boxing, things like that. There's a fighter named Joelle Romero and there's a story about he had his orbital bone fractured and they sent him to these doctors out in Europe and the doctors called back and they were like, where did you find this guy? Because his orbital has already started the healing process and it hasn't even been 72 hours since it was injured and they were
“like finding him to be like he had like some sort of super superhuman muscular church structure”
around his orbital and like that to me I was like that sounds exciting but I'm sure that doesn't happen too often in the field, right? No, we get some weird anatomy and weird healing process on a regular basis, but we don't call it weird, we call it just a different variant. It's kind of difficult to say to a three-year-old kid that he's weird because he has seven toes on his foot, okay? No, it's just a variant. It's hard to say that you're healing through slower, healing to fast
is a weird stuff. No, it's just a variant and we have to deal with it. So every person, regardless of their anatomical complexity or simplicity, is a human being and we approach it the same way. It's a fighter, yeah, fighters have different healing processes, athletes have different healing processes. Their injuries are a little bit more complex but we also deal with the traumas that are coming from the suicidal. So jump off the roofs, we do people who get into
the horrific accidents and they lose parts of their bodies. So I can tell you, one of my weirdest stories was when they come from the emergency room and said, listen, come and see the patient, he just fell off the plane. I said, if you love the plane, I mean, they call the priest, not me, he said, "No, no, come in, you're needed here." So I go there and the story is the 82-year-old retired pilot who was flying a private plane with his friend and the engine malfunction. So he had
to lend his plane somewhere else, not on the airport. So he lends it somewhere in the forest that when he was trying to get off the plane, he actually fell off the plane and broke his ankle. Oh, thank you. How's that? That was when he was in the air. Another exciting part about the call me is that you need to come and this is the sex drug zone rock and roll story. So I go and
I see the patient who just had the motorcycle accident and it was one of the ...
accident you can imagine. The car informed him stopped and he tried to pull away from that car
“and his motorcycle actually went to the right, but his left foot got caught between his motorcycle”
and the foot. So when I brought him in, his foot was laying next to him, not with him, but it was the king by the threat. And why is the story of the sex drugs and drug control? Because he was so high, he did not feel any pain. He had three girlfriends next to him coming him down and he was a drummer.
And the very first question he asked me said, "Can I still drum after the surgery?" I put this
foot together. He's still drumming. He probably changes girlfriends, I hope. I hope he's not dreading the motorcycle now. So these are just kind of the regular goings on in LA, I guess. Yeah, it's a regular basis. It's a hell of way to go. You know, we're here at Inside Success and one of my favorite questions to ask anybody that comes on the show is, what would you say are your number one tips for success?
For our audience out there, they're very entrepreneurial, they're super business minded. What would you
“say are your number one tips for success? I think the tip to success is to do what you love and do”
the best. I always tell my doctors, do not run for money. If you run for money, you will lose a
lot of patience. Do the best for the patient and you will always make a lot of money that way. I think the patients appreciate your work, patients appreciate your honesty, what you can and cannot do. Do not give unrealistic expectations to anybody who walks into your room, because they will remind you about it later on. Do what you love and do the best.
“Very poignant. Doc, it has been an incredible pleasure having you here on the show.”
Pleasure is mine. Where can people find you on social media, on your website, where's your practice level? The website is very simple. It's new ankle.com. We have new A5 clinics. We serve people in six hospitals and seven surgery centers. We do international work. So a new ankle.com is the place to go. So where they can find us, connect with us and this email send we will do the best to connect back with them. I will be there. I will be at new ankle.com shortly. I need to get this
bad boy updated. There you go. But guys, if you're still tuned in at this point of the episode, I want to make sure that you check out Dr. Armand's episode of America's Best Doc. America's Best Doctors, coming out shortly after this podcast episode air. So make sure you stay tuned for that. You're going to get a full deep dive on his story. How he became a doctor. How he came to the
States. But Doc, it has been an incredible joy having you here on the show. Guys, we will catch you in the next one.
