what kind of doc specializes in wound care? orhopedic, endicrinologist, general surg? do you know? I haven't started school yet and was just wondering, I am interested in wound care so what area would I study in?
Wound care? I would say primary care or ER Surgery/Medicine. It depends on what type of wound, where the wound is, and how serious really. ~AS1~
At the Shock Trauma Center at the Univ of Maryland, there is a soft tissue service that focuses primarily on severe wounds. These physicians are surgeons by trade. Many of their patients are diabetics, drug abusers (who have gotten bad infections), and those with wounds suffered during traumatic incidents (such as car or industrial accidents).
It seems critical care medicine may also be a path to take. I think it goes surgery residency, critical care/trauma fellowship.
If you're interested in abscesses, there are some community health docs (I think family practice and IM docs, probably? Josh Bamberger, below, is a family practice/public health doc) who work with injection drug users, who are putting special focus on working out systems of care to treat abscesses before they get so bad that they become surgery dept. patients. There was actually an abscess task force in San Francisco, which there may still be, which was designed to set up a care system to catch the wounds when they were still easily treatable. Admissions for abscesses were becoming a major cost for SF's public health system. I left town about a year ago so I'm not sure what the status of their work is right now. Using the SF example, I think there are some people in other cities who are trying to work on similar models, e.g., doing wound care at needle exchange sites, etc. http://www.health.org/govpubs/mmwr/vol50/19a3.htm The authors of the above MMWR article would be good to talk to/correspond with if this is the kind of wound care you're interested in, especially Dan Ciccarone and Josh Bamberger. I don't have contact info handy but I'm sure calling their respective institutions should get them. --joe
Most of the complex wound care in academics & the community is directed by surgeons. In particular General,Vascular, & plastic surgeons get extensive background in wound care and do much of the consulting for this
