One of the more essential functions that a podiatrist plays can be to check out the vascular or blood flow status to the foot and lower limb to determine if people are vulnerable or not of inadequate healing as a consequence of blood flow. If a person is at high risk for complications for that reason, then measures must be undertaken to lessen that chance and protect the foot from harm, especially when they also have diabetes. The monthly livestream for Podiatry practitioners, PodChatLive focused a whole stream to that problem. PodChatLive is a free continuing education live which goes live on Facebook. The supposed audience is podiatrists employed in clinical practice, but the real market extend to lots of other health care professionals as well. Through the stream there is lots of dialogue and comments commented on Facebook. Later on the recorded video version is added to YouTube and the podcast version is put onto the usual places like Spotify as well as iTunes.
In the episode on vascular problems and examination of the foot the hosts talked 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 also works in a CCG-commissioned, community-based National Health Service service in Manchester where he offers earlier identification, diagnosis and ideal clinical handling of people with suspected peripheral arterial disease. During the episode there were many real and useful vascular pearls from Martin and Peta. They brought up exactly what a vascular evaluation may need to look like in clinical practice, the importance of doppler use for a vascular analysis (and typical errors made), we listened to some doppler waveforms live (and recognize how relying on our ears alone is probably not ideal), and recognized the need for great history taking and screening in people who have known risk factors, particularly given that 50% of those with peripheral vascular disease have no symptoms.