A University of Iowa student's essay about how the Internet and social media helped the Ponseti method become the gold standard for the treatment of clubfoot has won a national contest sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Asitha Jayawardena wrote the winning essay and was named a NEJM Gold Scholar. He will receive a $500 travel voucher to attend the 200th Anniversary Dialogues in Medicine Symposium at Harvard University in Boston.

Ignacio Ponseti, M.D., developed a nonsurgical treatment for clubfoot at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in the 1960s that was clearly superior to surgery, but the method only became popular after parents began spreading the word about the technique on the Internet.