On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
A long-time friend's offhand observation in Bremen — that small artery disease is easy to see on an angiogram because it doesn't look like nature — leads to Mandelbrot, Murray's law, and a quantifiable complexity index for the diabetic foot.
Over dinner at EWMA-DEWU in Bremen with longtime collaborator and renowned biomechanist Prof. Sicco Bus, talk drifted from classification to language — and to why English insists on two words for the same hole in the body. A slow look at what wound vs. ulcer is silently encoding every time we write it down.
Gavish et al. flip photobiomodulation into a diagnostic stress test. With dynamic thermal imaging, DFUs warm by ~2.1 °C after PBM while venous ulcers barely budge — and colder DFUs respond most. A clean proof-of-concept for precision triage of chronic leg ulcers.
Google Scholar ticked over to 95,006 citations overnight. The number is real — the story behind it isn't mine. An h-index of 134 and an i10-index of 568 reflect 568 conversations between collaborators, residents, fellows, patients, and friends. A note on what citations actually are, why limb preservation is and always will be a team sport, and gratitude to everyone whose hand has been on the work.
An email from Ben Lipsky brings new biomarker data — IL-17, IL-12p70, HMGB1, IL-8, CRP — that may be the strongest case yet for splitting "moderate" and "severe" diabetic foot infections in the IDSA and WIfI classification.
A Pasadena startup lets you check your diabetes risk with a single smartphone eye photo and a few questions — no needles, no lab. The direction is right: move screening upstream, make it free, make it fast.
Eighteen years ago, Larry Lavery and I stood up at the Malvern Diabetic Foot Meeting dinner and performed four Beatles rewrites in honor of Andrew Boulton. It brought the house down. As Malvern turns 40, here are the videos — writers' room, performance, applause, and Abbey walls — rescued, remastered, and archived for the record.
A new review asks whether we can move from patching to regrowing — and what stands between lab-bench organoids and the clinic.
Senneville and Lipsky return with a measured rejoinder in Clinical Infectious Diseases (April 2026), arguing that the Lagrand trial shows the absence of evidence of superiority — not definitive equivalence — between ulcer-bed and bone biopsy for guiding antibiotic therapy in diabetic foot osteomyelitis.
Our new paper in Burns and Trauma presents the most comprehensive review yet of spooky action at a distance therapies for diabetic limb preservation — from spinal cord stimulation and splenic ultrasound to remote ischemic conditioning and tibial transport. Five modalities, three mechanistic pathways, one shared destination: tissue repair at a distance.
