by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 30, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing
Recently we talked about the importance of nutritional assessment in patients with wounds and ulcers. I’ve posted a few of the countless cases I’ve seen in which improved nutrition (usually with some type of oral nutritional supplement) is what made the difference. I...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 4, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing
Check out this article by Efthymios Gkotsoulias, David Kuten and me, published in the April issue of Today’s Wound Clinic entitled, “Multidisciplinary Teams, All the Time: Treat the Patient and Not the Wound.” The patient had a limb-threatening lesion, and his leg was...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 1, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing
I can’t decide if I am seeing more truly starving patients since I started focusing on nutrition, or if I’m just more sensitive to it. All 3 of these patients have a body mass index (BMI) of less than 17. The first patient completely healed a stage 4 pressure ulcer...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 21, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing
We see a lot of sad situations in the field of wound care, but every now and then, a case really gets to you. This patient is a 47 yo man with a sacral pressure ulcer which had developed 2 months earlier when he was hospitalized for pneumonia. He suffers from a rare,...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 19, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing, PAD Hall of Shame
This is a retired physician in his 90’s whose mind is as sharp as a tack. He’s got congestive heart failure (CHF) and leg edema so severe that his skin is splitting open. He’s a chair sleeper in part because he has orthopnea (shortness of breath lying down), but also...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 11, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight, Nutrition & Wound Healing
This is a man in his mid-eighties with severe peripheral edema and a nasty looking leg ulcer that’s been present for about 2 months. His edema began 2 years ago, some weeks after his wife died. It turns out that he’s lost at least 20 lbs. over the past year. When I...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 10, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing
This is a poster I presented at a wound care conference two years ago. It’s not earth shattering, it’s just interesting. The patient is a woman in her late 80’s with advanced dementia who was being taken care of lovingly at home by her two daughters. She developed a...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 7, 2021 | Nutrition & Wound Healing
This is a 61-year-old woman with Lupus who presented with huge non-healing ulcers on both knees, thought to be related to vasculitis. However, her BMI (Body Mass Index) is only 13.8 — which is lower than patients I treated in Haiti. She weighs only 83 lbs. None...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 5, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight, Nutrition & Wound Healing
I’ve been talking about how I use IMPACT® in surgical patients who are nutritionally at risk. This is the second patient I tried the approach on. She’s a very beautiful, 33-year-old, previously healthy young woman who developed sepsis with cardiogenic shock and was in...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 4, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight, Nutrition & Wound Healing
I have spent the last several years making nutrition a major focus of my wound care practice, and I think it has revolutionized the way I manage patients. It would be ideal if all my patients could be evaluated by a registered dietician, but unless they have diabetes,...
