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Advanced Foot Wound Care: 3 Invaluable Benefits of Skin Grafting
If we were to name one of the biggest priorities at Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County, it’s to help our patients to hold onto their limbs, which means fighting back against slow-healing and chronic foot, ankle, and leg wounds.
One of the true work horses in this effort are skin grafts, which Dr. Thomas Rambacher and our team routinely turn to when dealing with wounds that are not healing in a timely manner.
And millions of Americans face such wounds: chronic wounds affect 2.5% of the population in the United States, including between 19-34% of people with diabetes.
Skin grafting basics
When you have a chronic or slow-healing wound, it means that your body isn’t following the healing timeline all that well and has stalled, which leaves you vulnerable to infection.
With skin grafts, we provide a little nudge forward in the healing process using one of two sources:
- Donor skin from your own body
- Advanced wound care products, namely bioengineered skin grafts
The advantages of using your own skin is that your body readily accepts the graft. The advantages of advanced wound care products are that they act as viable skin substitutes that we can further infuse with healing resources, such as growth factors and proteins.
The excellent benefits of skin grafts
Whichever skin graft we choose, the treatment will offer some incredibly valuable benefits, such as:
1. Skin grafts protect your wound against infection
One of the biggest concerns, if not the biggest, when it comes to slow-healing wounds is the heightened risk for infection. If your wound doesn’t heal over and close up, harmful bacteria can invade the opening and create an infection that can threaten your limb.
So, if you have a wound that’s not responding to more conservative treatments, one of our go-to tools is skin grafting, which can create a barrier against the bacteria.
2. Skin grafts support healing
Once that barrier is in place with a skin graft, your body can concentrate on healing instead of fighting off invaders. A skin graft creates a moist environment that lends itself to continuing the wound-healing cascade, which means moving forward through inflammation, cell proliferation, and remodeling.
And when you get to the end, your body has successfully plugged the breach and you have a healthy lower limb again.
3. Skin grafts can help with pain
Slow-healing and chronic wounds can be incredibly painful, especially if infection has set in. After we remove infected tissues, we place a skin graft over the wound that will cover the raw areas and encourage healing. As a result, you should experience some much-needed relief from your pain.
The bottom line is that skin grafts can play an important role in managing chronic wounds and they’re often the reason why we've helped so many patients to avoid amputation.
If you’re struggling with a chronic wound and want to explore skin grafts, please call our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.