"The Loss"

"Fact No 2: Of persons with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) who have a lower-extremity amputation, up to 55 percent require amputation of the second leg within two or three years.

Fact No. 3: In the US, black Americans are up to four times as likely as other racial groups to lose a leg—or three times, controlling for the disproportionate diabetes rates among them.

Fact No. 4: If diabetes and PAD continue to rise at the rate they have been for the last several decades, in just a few years, PAD—not trauma—will be the overwhelming reason for amputation. By then, our usual associations with amputees—with reckless boxcar hoppers, laurelled para-athletes, uniformed heroes (Lt. Dan, father and son Skywalker, etc.), and malformed children overcoming the odds—will need to be somatically adjusted, more or less, to the image of Brunson.

Amputation due to trauma is misfortune, but due to PAD is blameworthy negligence, because, as Metzler, Brunson’s surgeon, explains...

primary care or misinformation among patients, and because it typically results in amputation only when providers fail to intervene at the right time with the right resources, Metzler, like many others in his field, considers this number to be the quintessential measure of how flawed health care is today—“the canary in the coal mine if you will,” agrees Philip Goodney, a vascular surgeon based out of Lebanon, NH."

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-loss