About This Textbook

A clearer way to learn clinical prosthetics

A practical digital reference designed to make prosthetic foundations clear, usable, and easy to apply in practice.

Why this textbook exists

Introduction to Clinical Prosthetics was created to make prosthetic care easier to learn, apply, and revisit across training and clinical practice. It brings amputation care, componentry, gait, pain, and rehabilitation into one structured, visual reference that supports clinical reasoning and shared understanding across disciplines.

Who it is for

Whether you're learning prosthetics for the first time or refining clinical decision-making in practice, this textbook is designed to support:

Foundational learning and structured training
Clinical review and point-of-care reference
Real-world application of prosthetic concepts

Meet the author

Christopher Alessia, D.O., is a physiatrist specializing in the care of people with limb loss. He is board certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation and in electrodiagnostic medicine. His clinical work spans the arc of amputation care — perioperative and rehabilitation management, upper and lower extremity prosthetic prescription, gait analysis and alignment troubleshooting, and the treatment of residual limb and phantom limb pain. He is also an educator and lectures on various topics in the field of prosthetics.

The idea for this book grew from a problem he repeatedly encountered in both clinical practice and teaching: the information needed to understand amputation and prosthetic rehabilitation was available, but rarely in one place. Answering a practical clinical question often required cross-referencing surgical literature, rehabilitation resources, biomechanics textbooks, PubMed searches, and manufacturer materials to connect the dots. Many traditional discussions of prosthetic componentry were also dated, focusing on older classifications or devices rather than the technologies and clinical decisions encountered in contemporary practice. This book was created to bring those pieces together and organize them around the way clinicians actually encounter prosthetic care: a person in front of you, a socket causing discomfort, a knee that snaps into hyperextension at midstance, and a question about whether the phantom pain will improve.

This book is intended to serve as a practical bridge between surgery, rehabilitation, biomechanics, and prosthetic technology—giving clinicians and trainees a clearer framework for understanding the patient’s course after amputation, and making thoughtful, clinically useful decisions throughout prosthetic rehabilitation.

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