Nearly a Million Words Later: What 17 Years of DiabeticFootOnline Look Like in a Word Cloud #ActAgainstAmputation @ALPSlimb

Nearly a Million Words Later: What 17 Years of DiabeticFootOnline Look Like in a Word Cloud

I recently did something I probably should have done a long time ago. I pointed an AI at every single blog post on this site—all 3,835 of them—and asked it to show me what nearly two decades of writing about the diabetic foot actually looks like when you zoom all the way out.

The answer? Almost a million words. 992,873, to be exact. That’s roughly 12 full-length novels. Or about 3,300 pages of double-spaced text. All about one thing: saving limbs.

The Big Picture in Big Letters

The word cloud tells you everything you need to know about what this site has been about. The biggest terms—diabetic foot, amputation, foot ulcer, wound healing, limb salvage—are the pillars of what we do. No surprise there. But look a little closer and you’ll see the words that, to me, tell a more interesting story: team, technology, device, innovation, future, change, hope.

That’s the narrative arc of this field over the past 17 years. We started with a problem—a catastrophic one, with amputation rates that are frankly unconscionable—and we’ve been building the team, the tools, and the evidence to change it.

By the Numbers

Here’s what a million words of diabetic foot blogging looks like when you break it down:

Metric	Count
Total blog posts	3,835
Total words	992,873
Years active	17 (2009–2026)
Average posts per year	~226
Peak year	2012 (690 posts)
Average words per post	~259

That 2012 spike? That was the year we were firing on all cylinders at the Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance (SALSA) at the University of Arizona—cranking out research, building collaborations, and apparently blogging like our lives depended on it. Almost two posts per day.

The Language of Limb Preservation

The term frequency analysis reveals the vocabulary of our field. Here are the top phrases that appear across nearly two decades of posts:

Phrase	Mentions
Diabetic foot	3,773
Wound healing	929
Limb salvage	738
Foot ulcer	678
Foot care	520
Limb preservation	483
Wound care	396
Vascular surgery	284
Major amputation	246
Peripheral artery (disease)	198
Artificial intelligence	77
Machine learning	66

A couple of things stand out. First, the evolution from limb salvage (738 mentions) to limb preservation (483 mentions) is visible in the data. That linguistic shift reflects a real conceptual one—from heroic last-ditch saves to proactive, systematic prevention. Second, the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the corpus tells you where the field is heading. Those terms barely existed in the early years of this blog.

The Words That Matter Most

But honestly, the single-word frequencies might be the most revealing. The word “team” appears 1,059 times. “Risk” shows up 1,946 times. “Prevention”: 703. “Innovation”: 258. “Hope”: 202.

And then there’s “SALSA”—our Southwestern Academic Limb Salvage Alliance—appearing 1,040 times. Not bad for an acronym that also describes a condiment.

The word “death” appears 301 times. Because that’s the reality we’re fighting. Diabetic foot disease carries a five-year mortality rate worse than most cancers. Every amputation we prevent isn’t just a limb saved—it’s a life extended.

What’s Next?

Seventeen years. Nearly a million words. 3,835 posts. And we’re just getting started.

The word cloud is a mirror. It reflects what this community has been talking about, worrying about, and working toward. And increasingly, the words showing up in these posts—sensor, wearable, AI, remote monitoring, telemedicine—are telling us that the future of limb preservation won’t look much like the past.

Which is exactly the point.

#ActAgainstAmputation #DiabeticFoot #LimbPreservation #WordCloud #DataVisualization