Marco PA Brings Surgical Expertise to Human Fish Hook Removal

Marco Island’s Mike Pisano is an avid outdoorsman and fishing guide. But it’s his 25 years of experience in the emergency room as a physician assistant (PA) that led him to invent DHUKR®, an FDA-approved human fish hook removal tool.

“It didn’t dawn on me as a fishing guide or fishing captain,” Pisano said, “where we’re often removing fishing hooks in a boat. The whole idea behind this tool dawned on me in the emergency room where I just got so frustrated using captain techniques to remove fish hooks. We have a tool for everything else in the ER, but we didn’t have a tool for this.”

Pisano said he used to describe how he removed fish hooks on his fishing trips to his medical colleagues. 

“I would have to explain to everybody how we did it in the field,” he said. “But that shouldn’t be necessary in the medical field. We needed a designated tool to do this.” 

And with that, the idea for DHUKR® was spawned.

“That’s where this came from,” Pisano said, holding the DHUKR® in his hand. “I got so frustrated that I started to draw things. I went into my garage and I got a screwdriver and I bent it because I wanted to create a five degree offset. Then I took a real fishing hook and soldered it onto the screwdriver. Then I got two BBs from a BB gun and soldered them on the end. I still have that prototype tool I made out of a Stanley screwdriver.”

Pisano said it’s common for people to show up at the hospital with a fish hook embedded in their body.

“We get them quite a lot,” he said. “We did nationwide research on how many fish hooks happen per year and it’s in the hundreds of thousands.”

And that’s a small number compared to the number of people who get hooked but don’t come to the ER. 

“In our hospital alone, we see them regularly,” he said. “I mean, we’re in the fishing capital of the world in Florida, and it happens quite often year-round. As a captain taking people fishing, you learn how to do the string method. It’s a really cool and pretty effective way to do it. But it doesn’t always work. And it can take time to set up. People get nervous about it because they see a string and they’ve got a metal hook hanging out of them.

“Being a lover of the outdoors, when outdoor cases come into the ER, I always gravitate to them, whether somebody was bitten by something or had a fish hook stuck in them. In the ER, I’d be working with docs and other PAs that didn’t know the string method.

“There’s a couple of Bibles of emergency medicine; they’re like procedure books. And in those books are three ways to remove a fish hook. One’s called the needle method, where you slide a needle down and try to disengage the barb and pull it out the way it went in. The other one is a string method where you put your finger down on the shank of the hook to disengage the barb, and you yank it out with the string around the throat of the hook. The other is pushing it through and cutting off the barb. Every time I was in the ER and I would go to do these cases, I felt silly because what I do on my boat I’m doing in the ER. We still have these same three methods being taught. That has never changed. Then I started thinking about the fishing industry and what I found out was not only didn’t the medical field have a tool for this, the fishing industry didn’t either. There’s a million ways to remove a hook from a fish. There were zero ways to remove a hook from a person.”

With Pisano’s DHUKR®, a fish hook can easily be removed in seconds. He uses a silicone arm to demonstrate how easy it is to remove hooks with the DHUKR®.

“When you have a business like this and you want proof of concept,” he said, “there’s not a lot of people lining up to have hooks put in them to prove that you’re right. So I started using silicone arms. That’s the closest thing to skin.” 

Pisano has videos on YouTube showing him taking fish hooks out of his own arm in seconds.

“It’s not like I could hire somebody to be the hook dummy,” Pisano said. “It’s me. I get stuff on the internet all the time, guys responding back to me about my removals. They’re like, ‘Bro, that is savage dedication to your product. You sold me.’ If I’m going to put a hook in me and show you how it works umpteen times, with umpteen different sizes and variations of hooks, I’m going to show you that I believe in it.”

The DHUKR® tool has come a long way since the prototype Pisano created in his garage. 

“The whole thing started in 2018 in the ER,” Pisano said. “And then by the time I nailed down patents and trademarks and all that, I launched the company at ICAST, the world’s largest sport fishing trade show. I launched it there three years ago and the place went bananas. ASA, the American Sportfishing Association, and ICAST’s board came to our booth and said, ‘You know, we haven’t seen anything so cool in a long time.’ This is a simple tool the size of a screwdriver. When I launched it we were covered with people. It was validation that I wasn’t the only one who believed in this.”

Pisano said the only problem he has at trade shows is the never-ending stories fishermen share with him about being hooked.

“One of the hardest parts of being at these shows is that people love to tell you their fish hook stories,” he said. “I’ve heard them all. But it’s so hard when you’ve got a whole booth covered with people and you get some slow talkers being very detailed with their fish hook stories.”

Pisano says seeing the DHUKR® in action is believing.

“I’ll do demos at shows,” he said. “I’ll have a mannequin arm and I’ll have five different style hooks in there and I’ll say, ‘You just tripped in your garage and fell onto your tackle box and all of these hooks went in your arm. Watch this.’ And in 10 seconds I’ll take out five hooks and they’re all blown away. They say, ‘Oh, let me try it.’ I’ll turn the tool around and hand it to them just see how they are with it. How are they going to hold it? And 90 percent of them just go right to it. Once you engage this tool with the five-degree offset built in, you just straighten the tool. Once the tool is level, pull straight back and it’s going to come right out.”

Pisano already has the DHUKR® is being used in ERs and he’s shipping them worldwide.

 «The hospitals and doctors are like, ‹this is incredible.› I can›t imagine how many countries we›ve shipped to around the world already.»

Pisano said his experience with handling medical devices helped when designing the ergonomics of the DHUKR®. 

“When I designed this original handle, thinking as a medical person, my thought was, ‘How would this feel in someone’s hand? Are they afraid it’s going to slip?’ It’s got kind of a pinky break, it’s got a trigger, it’s got a thumb rest. It’s got grooves in there so that when it’s in your hand and you go to use it for the first time, you’re really confident that it’s going to work. The other thing is I absolutely refused to put any moving parts on it. I wanted to make it access the hook as easily as possible.”

Locally, you can purchase the DHUKR® at Sunshine Ace Hardware. But it is also available at dhukrtool.com, Amazon.com, and westmarine.com. None of the three versions of the DHUKR® sell for over $40. 

“Amazon has been huge for me,” Pisano said. “I sell to mom-and-pop shops all over the country. We’re onboarding with Walmart right now. We’re on eBay. We’re on TikTok. We’re onboarding with Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s. We’re still working to try to get in with Dick’s, Tackle Warehouse, Sportsman’s Warehouse, all the big stores.”