What are some of the particular challenges of treating Diabetic Foot Ulcers?
I think if you talk about diabetes one of the biggest problems we find is that half of the folks who have diabetes don’t know they have the disease. So if you look at the national population there are 16 million Americans with diabetes, and eight million of them are unaware of their illness. Here in Texas, we estimate there are about a million individuals with diabetes and again, half of these folks don’t know they have the disease. When we have patients present to the wound care center with chronic non-healing wounds one of the first things we do is test them for diabetes. Many times we are the first physicians to diagnose their illness. Patients that come for treatment of a wound discover that their underlying problem is a chronic disease with multisystem effects that will require lifetime treatment. With diabetes, about eighty percent of patients will have some form of neuropathy. There are three different types of neuropathy; sensory, motor, and autonomic. Patients can develop one
