 The goal of the limb preservation clinic is to provide what we call multidisciplinary care and what that is is it's combining specialists from all areas that have an interest and a passion and a drive for limb salvage. Limb salvage in and of itself is essentially not accepting that patients will go on to blow the knee amputation. Limb salvage is also acknowledging the fact that in this country there's 29 million diabetics and that approximately 15 to 25 percent of them will develop a wound in their lifetime. So what does that mean? It's interesting they've looked at this and found that if you're diabetic and you've had a wound for more than two weeks, you have a 40 percent chance of dying in 10 years. You have a two and a half times greater likelihood of death at five years. These are very serious statistics and I think that it commonly goes unnoticed and being part of a limb preservation team everyone is aware of these findings and people are aware that this is something that we do have to address very aggressively and very passionately but also very systematically and a lot of it cannot be done by one person. The limb preservation clinic is an interesting environment where we've got vascular surgery specialists where oftentimes the patients' circulations improved enough to allow for healing myself for both surgical correction of any deformities that are present while also dealing with the wound care part of it too and being able to have the patient on a weekly regimen such that they're able to be followed aggressively, have care coordination performed so that they have all their supplies, they know where they're going to go, they know who their doctor is, they know what antibiotics they should be on if there is an infection and that there's this adequate surveillance and dedicated approach that the patient has followed on weekly and successfully at that time. So I think that that is the true definition of multidisciplinary care and this limb preservation clinic that we're trying to establish here at University of Maryland. Below-the-knee amputation can be an option for patients. It's just not something that should be taken as, well, this patient is unlikely to heal so therefore we're not going to try and I think the best part about the limb preservation clinic and multidisciplinary approach to limb salvage is we will do everything we can within our means and given what we have to help save these limbs. I oftentimes tell patients it's like a plant. You have the water or the rain which comes from the vascular surgeon. I bring the sunlight but the patient has to bring the soil. If you have bad soil, some factors can be fixed while other times we're kind of left with what we got but we have to work within those confines and we've had some amazing results already. Patients that have been sent here because we are tertiary care referral center that have had excellent results despite having so many hurdles in their healing process.