by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Aug 6, 2020 | Don't Miss This
The Mysterious Case of the Ischemic Achilles There’s a case report published online in “Vascular Disease Management” that is worth some conversation. The patient underwent a dermatological procedure on the back of the left calf that involved cryotherapy. About two...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Nov 18, 2019 | Don't Miss This
These excruciatingly painful left leg lesions began after a minor scratch five month earlier. New lesions had continued to form in response to debridements at another wound center. She had a new and rapidly enlarging anterior shin lesion on the other leg that formed...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Nov 15, 2019 | Don't Miss This
The photo above shows the un-encouraging 6-month course of a dehisced abdominal wound. There’s not much to show for all my hard work. Treatment with Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT) had absolutely no impact (and broke down the periwound skin), so we stopped. I...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Aug 13, 2019 | Don't Miss This
I have been pondering the economics of an “anti-biofilm” agent. I received Plurogel samples from Medline and had dramatic success in a very compromised patient, both for her acute wound (due to an ulcerated hematoma) and her chronic ankle ulceration related to her...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Aug 2, 2019 | Don't Miss This, Nutrition & Wound Healing
Fifty years ago I stayed up late with my grandfather to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts land on the moon. We sat riveted, watching grainy images on a tiny black and white television set, marveling at how far technology had advanced. In the 1960s, my father was an...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 24, 2019 | Don't Miss This
If you have been in wound care awhile, you know that a lot of it is pattern recognition. It’s a game of “duck, duck, goose.” I am not sure I would have figured these two cases out, except that I happened to be seeing both patients during the same time frame. That by...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 17, 2019 | Don't Miss This
As any wound care practitioner knows, you can work your way through the Merck Manual of Rare Diseases every year because wounds are a SYMPTOM of disease. If there’s a rare condition, it will probably end up in the wound center. The question is whether we recognize it....
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 14, 2019 | Don't Miss This
About four years ago I went to Thomazeau, Haiti with the organization Live Beyond. Just before I left, I received an email alert about a significant outbreak of Chikungunya disease. My response was the “Chicken-What?” I had never heard of it, although it affects...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 11, 2019 | Don't Miss This, Pressure Cooker: Rethinking Pressure Ulcers
I recently saw a patient with digital ischemia who got improvement in both pain and tissue viability with transdermal oxygen from the OxyBand dressing. There are a lot of possible reasons for digital ischemia, so it’s important to know why the patient has ischemic...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 8, 2019 | Don't Miss This, Pressure Cooker: Rethinking Pressure Ulcers
In 2016, The National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (NPUAP) changed their staging system. I am not talking about changing the term “ulcer” to “injury.” I am talking about changing the definitions of stages 2, 3 and 4. This is a big deal, and...
