On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
Honored to deliver the keynote at the inaugural meeting of ADFA in Paris.
Chronic wounds are biological computers stuck in a boot loop. Sharp debridement is Control-Alt-Delete — the histological reboot that converts a chronic wound back into an acute one. Only then can you run the apps.
A new Cell paper shows nerve hyperinnervation suppresses skin regeneration -- and botulinum toxin A removes the brake. For diabetic foot ulcers, this could be the breakthrough we've been waiting 30 years for.
A new systematic review finds that roughly one in three adults in remission after a healed diabetic foot ulcer develop a recurrent ulcer within 12 months — a risk comparable to several common cancers. Healing is the beginning of the next chapter, not the end of the story.
A few weeks ago, we launched The ZIP Code Lottery — a data narrative showing how amputation rates in Los Angeles County track almost perfectly with poverty, not clinical severity. It struck a nerve. The response told us something important: people want to see the data, and they want it to be impossible to look... Continue Reading →
We have been tracking the emerging science of the wound microbiome on this blog for well over a decade -- from Randy Wolcott's early observations on "misanthropic microbial communities" (2009), to our own work with Spichler, Hurwitz, and Lipsky on microbiology from Louis Pasteur to "CSI" (2015), to the microbiome in wound healing -- good,... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago, we launched The ZIP Code Lottery — a data narrative showing how amputation rates in Los Angeles County track almost perfectly with poverty, not clinical severity. It struck a nerve. The response told us something important: people want to see the data, and they want it to be impossible to look... Continue Reading →
A new accelerometer-based study from Michigan and Oxford shows that moderate-to-vigorous physical activity is associated with significantly lower odds of diabetic peripheral neuropathy — with vigorous activity cutting the odds by 60%.
In 2009, California hospitals collectively documented 7,973 lower-extremity amputations in diabetic adults. Dr. Carl Stevens at Harbor-UCLA decided to ask a question most people in medicine had quietly avoided: where do these patients live? The answer, published five years later in Health Affairs, was the kind of finding that is simultaneously obvious in retrospect and... Continue Reading →
Vitamin D has been medicine for millennia — we just didn't know it. A tour through its history, its biology, and what the evidence now says about its role in diabetic foot ulcer healing.
