Are there any Skin Grafting and reconstructive procedures available for foot? - Dr. Surindher D S A

The foot is a very unique structure in the body. The problem is it doesn’t have enough soft tissue cover. It does not enough muscles there. Most of the foot is made of soft muscles, bones, small tendons that are connected to the muscles to the leg. Foot is prone to lot of injuries. The reconstructive options to the foot are the reconstructive ladder, that is from the simple to the complex. So the simple reconstruction what you can do on the foot is skin grafting. We take a piece of skin from the thigh and fix on the raw surface on the foot, that gives a coverage for the raw area. Once the bones and tendons are exposed, you can’t do a simple skin grafting, you have to do something extensive that is the flap. Flap is a piece of skin which is full thickness, but it has its own blood supply. Flap has to be taken somewhere near the area of injury. This is called a local flap, which is attached. The topmost reconstruction is called the free flap which is a free tissue transfer or a reconstructive microsurgery. When you do not have tissues in the vicinity which you can rotate in form of a flap and cover the wound and the bones are exposed, then you have to cover the large chunk of tissue which has muscles, skin and its own blood supply has to be taken from another area in the body, usually from the back, that is called latismus dorsi, along with the skin and we put on the foot and with microsurgery, the blood supply is attached to the artery of the leg. So this your most complex reconstruction of the foot. The complexity depends on what type of injury, what is the injury, what conditions you are trying to save and what is the general condition of the patient. So the simplest is the skin grafting and the mostly complex is the microsurgery of the foot.