One of my patients once asked me where to find the flattest five-mile run in San Francisco. Another wanted to know which climbing shoe held up best on a prosthetic foot. A third wanted advice on whether his amputation should change his golf swing.

I've been a prosthetist since the late '80s. None of those are questions I can answer.

That's the gap MyLimb exists to fill.

What I've Seen From the Inside

When my patients get home at night and kick their shoes off, they open their laptops and start searching. They look for the trip they want to take, the hobby they want to start, the ache they don't recognize. They come back the next week and tell me what they found — or, more often, what they couldn't.

Over thirty years of practice, I've watched the same pattern play out again and again. Patients piece together what they need from a scattered list — one website for travel, one for medical information, one for equipment, one for community. Half of those websites lose funding and disappear within a year. The community ends up maintaining its own makeshift directory, passing notes through Facebook groups and word of mouth.

There is information out there. There is education. There are good travel sites and good support groups. What there isn't, anywhere, is a single place where a limb loss patient, their family, a doctor, or a therapist can go and simply start. And what little does exist is mostly North American or European — almost nothing truly international. That's its own kind of failure, because limb loss is a global experience.

What People Told Us They Needed

A few years ago I started asking patients, fellow prosthetists, physical therapists, and surgeons a simple question. If there were one place online built specifically for the limb loss community, would you use it?

The answer was always yes. More than that — patients started asking me directly, "Aaron, when can you make that happen?"

That was when this stopped being a thought experiment.

What I Want MyLimb to Become

What I want MyLimb to be is the place you reach for first — and ideally the only place you have to reach for at all — when something about your life or your family's life as a limb loss patient sends you looking for an answer.

That covers a lot. Insurance and the long fight to get coverage approved. Travel that knows what to ask about accessibility and care. Daily-living questions a forum thread can't always answer. Stories from people who have lived what you're living. And the conversations clinicians, manufacturers, and researchers are having when they shape what comes next — happening somewhere the community can actually see them.

What MyLimb Is Today

We're launching with two pieces: the magazine and the community.

The magazine is the place for stories like the one you're reading, plus expert articles from clinicians, perspectives from manufacturers, research updates, and the kind of long-form content you can't get from a forum reply. The community is the farmer's market moment — except online, and on purpose: a place where two people who share this experience can meet without having to bump into each other by accident.

These two pieces are the foundation. They're only the first floor.

What's Coming Next

The full vision goes well beyond magazine and community. Specialized e-commerce for equipment that's hard to find anywhere else. A peer-to-peer marketplace where people can swap or sell parts and adaptive gear within the community. A travel experience built around a limb loss mindset — one that knows what to ask about accessibility, terrain, climate, and care before you ever book a flight. Insurance advice and fundraising tools for the parts that wear families down the most. And an AI-driven search experience, so a patient with a question at midnight can get a real answer drawn from expert knowledge — not a Google guess.

The rest — events, reviews, peer ambassadors — we'll grow into as we hear from the community.

Built With You

Here's where I want to be honest: we're in the infancy of building this. Lofty dreams, lofty ambitions — and we have to start somewhere. What you see today is meant to be just enough to show what MyLimb is becoming over the coming months.

If you come in now, we want you to stay with us as we grow. Part 3 of this series goes into the specifics — what each part of the community can do, and how to help shape what we build next. For now: the door is open.

Start the conversation