On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
An unexpected reunion with Dr. William Tettelbach and a generous welcome from the MLK Community Healthcare team made a September 3 visit to South Los Angeles a powerful reminder of why this work matters.
A provocative 2026 cohort moves PMMA away from the diabetic foot wound and into remote calf tunnels. The idea is genuinely interesting—but extensive decompression, major reporting problems, and an unproven mechanism make this a signal to investigate, not a treatment to adopt.
At the 2026 VASSA Congress in Gqeberha, four international keynotes, decades of friendship, and a locally led consensus process converged around one life-affirming goal: making preventable amputation less inevitable across South Africa.
A major Western Pacific review led by Byron Perrin and Peter Lazzarini maps the world’s largest regional diabetes-related foot disease burden—and eight practical ways countries can strengthen care.
A multinational team reports strong 14-day reproducibility for the simple ACT neuropathy screen—an important reliability milestone, but not yet a diagnostic-accuracy study.
A Stanford team has taught an algorithm to translate Doppler sounds into clinically meaningful ankle-brachial index ranges—potentially bringing vascular assessment closer to the point of care.
A new systematic review and meta-analysis supports functional moisturizers—particularly urea-containing formulations—for diabetic foot xerosis on intact skin.
Margin-directed antibiotic therapy after surgery for diabetic foot osteomyelitis is appealing, but surgical assessment, histopathology, and microbiology often provide different answers. A new Clinical Infectious Diseases Viewpoint explains why multidisciplinary interpretation and prospective standardization are essential.
A new Diabetes Care registry study shows that Charcot neuro-osteoarthropathy is far more than a local foot disorder. Following diagnosis, nearly nine in ten patients required emergency hospitalization, almost one-third underwent amputation, and only 44% were alive and amputation-free at five years.
In a new Nature Materials study, traction-force-activated payloads capture the body's own growth factors and release them when repairing cells pull on the scaffold. The work spans living bone and skin models and ex vivo human skin - a striking preclinical step, not yet a treatment for diabetic foot ulcers.
