How Prescription Footwear Can Help Your Wounds Heal Faster

From the moment you get out of bed each morning, you rely on your feet and lower legs to get you through your day, making them among the hardest working areas of your body.

Under normal circumstances, if you’re hobbled by a lower limb wound, it can certainly impact how you get around. If, however, you’re among the tens of millions of Americans who have diabetes or peripheral artery disease, (PAD), that same wound is far more concerning and harder to heal.

When it comes to slow-healing foot, ankle, or leg wounds, Dr. Thomas Rambacher and the team here at Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County are equipped with a comprehensive healing toolkit. An important fixture in this kit is prescription footwear that can help expedite your healing, and protect your feet down the road.

Prescription footwear in a protective role 

There are a few roles that prescription footwear plays at our practice and we first want to quickly touch on its preventive role. 

For the more than 11% of the population in the United States who has diabetes, the most common complication is peripheral neuropathy, which affects at least half of diabetics.

As a result of this nerve damage, many people develop a loss of protective sensation (LOPS) in their lower limbs. What this means is that you may not notice when a wound develops and something as small as a blister can turn into a slow-healing wound and a spreading infection that threatens the limb.

In a preventive role, prescription footwear can help protect your feet when you have LOPS as the footwear is designed to cushion and protect your feet.

Prescription footwear in a healing role

If you’re dealing with a problematic lower limb wound, prescription footwear is key. For people with diabetes, as well as the 6.5 million Americans aged 40 and older who have peripheral artery disease, lower leg wounds are almost always problematic due to compromised blood flow that stalls healing.

While we pull out all the stops to move your slow-healing wound along, it’s important to provide a protective space around the wound, which we accomplish with prescription footwear.

Early healing footwear often comes in the form of boots that disperses the pressure on your wound through offloading. These boots can also come in forms that apply uniform contact over your foot, ankle, and lower leg to prevent friction. Between avoiding pressure while you walk and preventing your foot from sliding around and irritating the wound, these prescription boots can greatly accelerate healing.

Once your wound heals, we still recommend prescription footwear to protect the newly formed skin. We design this footwear to match your specific needs so it typically features special lifts, pads, and soles that take the pressure off of the area where your wound has just closed.

Take the next step with prescription footwear

As you can see, prescription footwear can play many roles when it comes to avoiding and treating lower limb wounds.

If you’d like to explore whether prescription footwear is right for your wound care, we invite you to contact our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or by requesting an appointment online today.