How Eliminating Pressure Points Can Encourage Wound Healing

About 2.5% of the overall population in the United States is engaged in a battle to promote healing in a chronic wound. Creating the optimal healing environment when you have a chronic wound — such as a diabetic foot or venous ulcer — becomes the priority, and one of the keys to this is to eliminate pressure points.

At Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County, that’s exactly what Dr. Thomas Rambacher and our team specialize in — wound care. While there are many pieces to the chronic wound care puzzle, avoiding pressure points is an important one and we explain why here.

Keeping wound healing on track

When you develop a chronic foot, ankle, or leg wound, it means that the healing process has stalled. Briefly, the wound healing cascade includes four stages:

Stasis — a clot forms to plug the breach and stop bleeding
Inflammation — your body starts repairing damaged tissues
Proliferation — new cells arrive to rebuild tissues
Remodeling — the final tissues form and mature

Each of these stages relies on good blood flow to deliver the necessary resources and to carry away waste products. With chronic wounds, this process stalls in the inflammatory stage.

So, our goal is to help your body to move past the inflammation phase and into the final stages of wound healing so that you don’t develop a serious infection.

Eliminating wound-healing hurdles

Whether you’re among the 1.6 million people in the U.S. who are dealing with a diabetic foot ulcer each year, or you have a chronic leg wound for another reason, such as peripheral artery disease (PAD), our approach is the same — optimize the wound-healing environment.

As we already mentioned, one of the keys to this is to address, and eliminate, pressure points. There are two reasons why this step is critical:

1. Encourage blood flow

Getting blood to your wound is essential to keep wound healing on track. As we reviewed above, your blood not only delivers resources like oxygen and new cells, it also carts off waste. So, if you have something that’s pressing up against the blood vessels in the area of the wound, it can compromise the circulation to your wound.

2. Stopping the wound from getting worse

To illustrate this point, let’s review what happens when you get a blister, which may very well have been the humble beginning of your current leg wound. A blister first forms because of pressure points and friction. Once this small, painful sore emerges, the last thing you want to do is to place more pressure and friction on the area, which only serves to irritate the wound and delay healing.

This same concept applies to your chronic leg wound. We want to give it the space it needs to heal without interference from pressure and friction, which will only make matters worse.

This is why we spend a good deal of time ensuring that there are no pressure points on your chronic wound, and we have several innovative tools and techniques to accomplish this goal.

If you have a chronic leg, ankle, or foot wound that you believe can benefit from a pressure point-free environment, please contact our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.