GLP-1 Medications and Prosthetic Care: A Conversation with Cassandra Delgado

At Vessl, we love hearing from the people doing the real work in prosthetic care every day. Our Co-Founder and CEO, Sydney Robinson, recently chatted with Cassandra Delgado, CPO at Coyote, covering everything from what it actually feels like to work in O&P to one of the most talked about topics in healthcare right now.

Cass is a certified prosthetist orthotist who trained at Alabama State and completed her residency at the University of Michigan. She has worked across large medical centers and private practices in New York, consults with prosthetic companies, conducts her own clinical research, and is currently co-authoring a physical therapy textbook on orthotics and prosthetics. The conversation opens with how she got into the field, what surprised her most once she was in it, and what she thinks truly meeting a patient where they are at looks like in practice.

GLP-1 Medications: A Growing Topic in Prosthetic Clinics

From there, the conversation gets into GLP-1 medications and why prosthetists need to be paying attention. These medications, commonly known as Ozempic and Wegovy, are being prescribed at scale for diabetes management and weight loss. For most people, the story ends there. But for clinicians fitting sockets, they introduce something much more immediate: rapid, ongoing limb volume change that traditional socket designs were never built to handle.

What Clinicians Are Actually Seeing

Cass came to this topic through her own patients, not a research paper, and when she looked for clinical guidance specific to O&P, she found almost nothing. So she went and found the answers herself. What clinicians are reporting in practice includes frequent socket adjustments, changes in skin integrity, patient fatigue from poor nutrition, and limb volume shifting in ways that are hard to keep up with. There is also a lot more to this story, including some findings from her research that genuinely caught us off guard.

There is also a surprisingly fun moment in there involving a Gila monster. Yes, really.

Watch the full conversation and hear it all from Cass herself here.