If all you have is a hammer…

Let's not mince words, amputation rates continue to rise worldwide. Not merely the numbers but the percentages, and yet, in my email box week, after week is yet another conference dedicated to critical limb ischaemia, limb preservation, yet another advertisement for a vascular intervention designed to do… something. LinkedIn hosts a plethora of fact spewing denizens touting their conferences and expertise with the same faces, names and topics with nothing really new other than the dates of the conference.

A myriad of questions immediately arise from those of us who are limb preservations experts who simply cannot understand why the universal end result of far too many lower extremity ulcers seems to be removal. At the risk of amazing those who would question my spiritual knowledge, Matthew 5:29 provides the simple answer as to why there is not just persistence but a ubiquitous and universal abdication of limb salvage…

‘and if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and, not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’