What Keeps a Foot Wound From Healing?

All of your body’s natural repair mechanisms come down to the efficiency of your circulatory system. It’s the delivery conduit for the raw materials of healing, but any blood flow impairment can leave you suffering from slow-healing wounds. 

Your feet and lower legs tend to suffer the most, since blood returning to the heart and lungs works against gravity. When the venous or arterial systems begin to fail, your feet are first to exhibit the effects due to slowed blood delivery. 

Cardiologist Enrique Hernandez, MD, of Advanced Vascular Cardiac & Veins in Miami, Florida, specializes in the treatment of foot wounds that result from impaired blood flow. Today, we take a look at what keeps a foot wound from healing, as well as the ways we can overcome the problem. 

Why slow-healing wounds affect your feet

Your body’s healing responses are designed to activate from the moment you suffer a skin injury like a cut or a scrape. When your body functions normally, there’s likely no sign of the injury two or three weeks later. 

Healing can slow because of external factors like failing to keep a wound clean and protected. This might add a week or two to your full recovery time. 

Chronic slow-healing wounds are a different matter, usually due to internal factors like a compromised blood supply. These could take months to heal, or in some cases they might never heal without medical intervention. Circulation issues are the primary cause of foot wounds that don’t heal.

Your feet are more commonly affected due to the circulation challenges already mentioned. Venous insufficiency allows blood to pool in your lower legs, restricting the flow of blood back to your heart, creating stasis ulcers. 

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) causes narrowing in the arteries, the fresh-blood suppliers that deliver the components of healing, which can add to the delay in wound recovery or form ischemic ulcers. 

Diabetes increases your risk of both venous insufficiency and PAD. Diabetic nerve damage can also make it difficult to feel pain associated with slow-healing wounds.  

Wound stages

Wounds go through four stages of healing. However, chronic wounds, such as foot ulcers, get stuck in stage two, the inflammatory stage, and won’t progress without intervention. 

It’s not fully understood why foot wounds remain in the inflammatory stage, though it’s clear that successful medical treatment breaks through this cycle. 

Treating slow-healing foot wounds

Depending on the nature and extent of your foot wound, we have a range of treatment options. Conservative approaches may include compression stockings to assist blood flow or orthotics to take continued pressure off a wound. 

Dr. Hernandez can administer more aggressive treatment when these therapies fail. Common strategies for foot wounds include: 

• Sclerotherapy and endovenous ablation to improve vein function
• Wound debridement to clean and remove damaged and infected tissue
• Advanced wound dressings
• Antibiotic therapy
• Angioplasty and stenting
• Skin substitute therapy
• Negative pressure wound therapy
• Limb salvage, to prevent the need for amputation in severe cases. 

Contact Advanced Vascular Cardiac & Veins in the early stages of a slow-healing foot wound to improve your long-term prognosis. Call or click to request an appointment at our nearest office.