My journey of discovery began the moment I set foot in the Hotel Fountainbleau in Miami Florida in April 1994. I was attending my first wound care convention and this was the big one. The convention floor was anchored in four corners by two big dressing manufacturers and two big specialty bed companies. Arrayed around the perimeter were tables laden with food and drink. Crowds of health care professionals, mostly nurses, fought for freebies of food and trinkets given away by salespeople hawking their wares. It was a shock but it set in motion a hunger to learn. My first question was how could bedsores generate so much money?

My company Universal Hospital Services Inc., had dispatched me to this convention to help our Florida District Office with our own exhibit. We were introducing our own specialty bed offering. Actually, we represented the manufacturer of a mattress overlay powered by a small compressor that had acquired a patent making it unique in important respects. The inventor claimed that his mattress overlay would reliably prevent the development of bedsores for a fraction of the cost of treating them. This claim sounded good to us but we as yet had no evidence to support it. That would come later. As for me I was just ignorant altogether.

Circumstance would provide me opportunity to spend many hours in the biomedical library of the University of Minnesota. I had a hunch. Something odd had happened to cause this explosion of demand for these products and services. The woundcare products catalogue listed over 2000 separate items. New specialists had been birthed to deal with bedsores. These conditions were no longer called bedsores but were now pressure sores or decubitus ulcers. What had happened?

I embarked upon a journey that led to a finding. This finding has never been seriously challenged. When its implications are realized the person receiving it concedes and often goes completely silent, refusing then to answer my calls.

The implications of the finding are enormous. One would hope that they are perceived positive as well but that has not been my experience. Bedsores consume billions of health care dollars every year to treat. There are no credible dollars dedicated to their prevention because conventional wisdom stipulates that this is not possible. But I can prove otherwise. That I am an antagonist is telling. Who benefits when the flesh around the sacrum of a person rots away?