The waiting room in William Yule's office is full by the time he arrives each morning.
Throughout the day, Yule sees dozens of patients, bouncing between four sparsely decorated examining rooms on such a tight schedule that he often has no time for lunch.
But Yule is no doctor. He's a prosthetist who fits limbs on recent amputees, and business is booming for one reason: diabetes.
"There's no such thing as a slow day," says Yule, of Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics Inc. in Downey, as he helps a client adjust her new right leg. "It can be hard because you can't help thinking a lot of these people don't need to be here."
As more Americans become obese and 1.5 million of them are diagnosed with diabetes each year, a growing number are confronting one of the most brutal consequences of the disease: suffering amputation of a limb or two.
The number of amputees in the U.S. has grown to 1.9 million, up nearly three-quarters of a million people over the last decade, according to federal statistics. About 60% of those are diabetes-related. (By contrast, as of April, the number of soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq who have had a limb, hand or foot amputated is 630.)
While public health experts are ramping up efforts nationwide to reverse the trend, it is leading to a boom in the long-sleepy prosthetics industry, which experts say hasn't seen a sales increase like this since its modern inception on the Civil War battlefields.
Sales of prosthetics have jumped from $340 million in 1996 to nearly $600 million last year, according to estimates based on federal data.
The industry's growing profile has even caught Hollywood's eye. The Discovery Channel aired a 10-part series on a Fairfax, Va., prosthetics shop last year called "Rebuilt: The Human Body Shop," and a prosthetist was prominently featured in the first season of Showtime's "Dexter." (He was a serial killer who -- DVD spoiler alert -- was killed in the final episode.)
Although the industry has begun to consolidate, most manufacturers and sellers in the field remain small to medium-sized companies and mom-and-pop shops that are adapting to their growing businesses.
Five years ago, Life-Like Prosthetics, a Torrance clinic that creates artificial limbs, saw two or three patients a day but now fits an average of eight patients daily, manager and former owner Carlos Sambrano said.
