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Informed Guidelines on Nutritional Intervention and Limb Preservation
David G. Armstrong, DPM, MD, PhD, discusses his recently published study "Nutrition Interventions in Adults with Diabetic Foot Ulcers" in which he shares guidelines on how nutritional interventions can help with limb preservation.
Transcript:
I'm David Armstrong. I'm a professor of surgery here at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in beautiful Los Angeles, California. And I help to run our Limb Preservation Program as well as our research group called SALSA fittingly or the Southwestern Academic Limb Salvage Alliance.
So guidelines are a little bit like a roadmap. And, obviously, any clinician or a team or even a patient, can go off-road as long as they know how to get back on that way again. And so, what's terrific about the guidelines that I was really lucky to be a part of very recently is that they were addressing something that we largely ignore.
I think that as clinicians, physicians, surgeons, or other clinicians, sometimes, we think about what medicine we can give someone. We think about what procedure we can do on a person.
How can I fix her? How can I fix him? And we may just give things like nutrition, just sort of lip service. We say, of course, someone needs good quality nutrition. Remarkably, before these guidelines, the sort of roadmap for women and men who are interested in limb preservation really did not exist in the same form. So it's just terrific that they now exist because the goal is really just a simple guide that can help move the needle forward a little and, hopefully, help heal people a little faster and keep a few more legs on a few more bodies.
