These 5 DIY medical devices might surprise you

Preventing worsening wounds on the cheap

Meredith Bassler was a family nurse practitioner student in a San Francisco outpatient podiatry clinic. Many of her patients had diabetic neuropathy and foot wounds that had become too large for them to care for at home.

The clinic couldn’t provide the right types of padding for every patient’s shoes to relieve the pressure and prevent their wounds from getting larger, so Bassler decided to make padding for their feet and to teach them how to do the same. If it worked, the patients might not develop non-healing foot ulcers that could lead to amputation.

She went to a drug store and bought up all of its self-adhesive corn and callus pads. After practicing at home, Bassler brought the pads to the clinic and cut them to make custom shapes that fit around the borders of each patient’s wound. She taught the patients to do the same and wrote in a blog post on makernurse.com that they were thrilled to have a low-cost, DIY solution to a potentially dangerous problem.

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