Diabetic Foot Ulcers – Treatment

Transcript

Now let’s go through the treatments for the wound, the Ischemia, and the foot infection, specifically. First for the wound. If you have a wound that is not predominantly infected or ischemic, it’s not what you put on these wounds that heals them – it’s what you take off. What I mean is: the things that the doctor might do first is focus on what’s called debridement of the wound – which means nothing more than trimming off what’s dead and helping (just like pruning a tree) to do a little bit of good quality landscaping on the wound to allow that thing to be nice and healthy so that it can move on to healing. That’s one thing you take off – what’s not viable. They might take off callus, they might take off dead tissue in the middle or around the wound. That’s number one. Number two: the other thing that we need to take off is the pressure or the weight and that can be done with various kinds of braces or casting or different types of what we call offloading technologies. The gold standard is what is called a total contact cast, and that’s a technique where a doctor or a technician might actually put a special kind of cast around you that spreads the force out over the entire bottom of your foot and then even up the cast wall. That can be really, really effective. Other kinds of braces that you might get at a prosthetic shop can also help to do similar things, but the key thing is while you’re in that, you need to be wearing it all the time for every step you take. Because if you take a step without that protection, it is – trust me – a step backwards.