Vascular Assessment of the Feet

One of the most essential roles that a podiatrist plays will be to assess the vascular or blood flow condition to the feet and lower limb to ascertain if patients are in danger or not for inadequate healing as a result of supply of blood. If a person is at high risk for complications because of that, then steps really need to be used to decrease that chance and safeguard the foot from problems, particularly when they've got diabetes mellitus. The regular livestream for Podiatrists, PodChatLive dedicated an entire episode to that issue. PodChatLive is a free continuing learning stream which goes live on Facebook. The expected market is podiatry practitioners doing work in clinical practice, however the real target audience include a lot of other health care professionals too. Throughout the live there is lots of discussion and commentary on Facebook. Eventually the recorded video version is published to YouTube and the podcast version is added onto the most common platforms like Spotify and iTunes.

In the stream on vascular issues and evaluation of the foot the hosts spoke with Peta Tehan, a podiatrist, and an academic at the University of Newcastle, Australia and also with Martin Fox who's also a podiatrist and works in a CCG-commissioned, community-based National Health Service service in Manchester, UK where he provides earlier identification, diagnosis and best clinical therapy for individuals with diagnosed peripheral arterial disease. During the episode there was several real and beneficial vascular pearls from Martin and Peta. They talked about exactly what a vascular review should look like in clinical practice, the need for doppler use for a vascular evaluation (and common errors made), all of us listened to several doppler waveforms live (and recognize how counting on our ears alone most likely are not ideal), and recognized the importance of good history taking and screening in individuals with known risk factors, especially given that 50% of people with peripheral arterial disease have no symptoms.