The Oscar-nominated actor reflects on a quarter-century of advocacy about diabetes and limb loss.
It’s been almost 40 years since Edward James Olmos earned an Oscar nomination for his role in Stand and Deliver. Playing high school teacher Jaime Escalante, Olmos created an indelible portrait of an educator who inspires his students to overcome societal challenges and become the best version of themselves.
The same goal drives Olmos to champion high-impact education about diabetes, limb loss, and amputation prevention. For 25 years he has worked with the American Limb Preservation Society (ALPS) to promote effective programs, treatments, and technologies that reduce the incidence of amputation. The annual Edward James Olmos Award for Advocacy in Amputation Prevention recognizes doctors from around the world for groundbreaking work in this field.
Although he’s not himself an amputee, Olmos has been deeply touched by diabetes-related limb loss. Five of his uncles required bilateral amputations because of diabetes, and his father died of complications from the disease.
“My father was 74 years old when he passed away,” the actor says. “I’m 78 and I don’t have diabetes. But I’m prediabetic, so I have to watch what I eat and exercise really well.”
Those types of habits—combined with broader access to food, fitness programs, and healthcare information—could prevent millions of amputations every year. The solution sounds simple, but achieving those changes on a broad scale is a real battle. After a quarter-century on the front lines, Olmos knows how difficult the fight can be, yet he remains hopeful. “The key to this whole thing is education,” he says. “But that’s also the hardest part in the whole situation.”
Olmos sat down with Amplitude recently to talk about his family history, his work with ALPS, and how Hollywood might play a role in raising awareness about limb loss. Learn more about Olmos’s work at limbpreservationsociety.org. This conversation is edited for length.
How did your relationship with the American Limb Preservation Society begin?
I met Dr. George Andros, who was advancing a theory of how to stop amputations of the leg. This was 2002 or 2003, and he asked if they could use my name to bring awareness to this work that he and other doctors all over the world were doing. He said, “Eddie, your community, the Latino community, is one of the most hard-hit communities with amputations and diabetes. Can you help me?”
So then I told him my story, and I wept when I told it, because it is really difficult. It’s a story in which every male in my father’s family—there were 11 children in his family, and six of them were males—died of diabetes. My father didn’t get his legs chopped off, but all of his brothers got both legs amputated. One of my uncles threw himself out the window of a high building after they amputated his legs. He was married, he had a family, and he just couldn’t take it.
It’s very difficult, psychologically, to lose a limb. I know everybody understands that, but if it’s an amputation you could have avoided if you had known more, it’s even more difficult. The key to all of this, is prevention—not treatment, but prevention. And so in 2003, we created the Edward James Olmos Award [for Advocacy in Amputation Prevention]. Dr. [Karel] Bakker from the Netherlands got the very first one, and we’ve given the award to the finest doctors dealing with this issue from all over the world.
What types of programs or activities do you recognize?
Anything that creates real understanding, an emotional understanding, of how important it is for us to take care of ourselves, and to motivate those around us to take care of themselves. The whole key is self-discipline, self-love, self-worth. How well do you take care of yourself? If you inspect your feet daily, if you wash and moisturize your feet daily, if you maintain your toenails, if you wear proper footwear, if you protect yourself from extreme temperatures on your feet, never use sharp things on your toes and your feet, that will help, especially if you have diabetes.
And we Latinos, because of our diets—we eat a lot of rice and beans and tortillas. As a kid, there wasn’t a day I woke up where I didn’t have that at some point. My great grandmother would make every morning, every day, rice and beans de la olla in the soup—not refried, but in the soup. That was always on the table, along with corn flakes and hot cakes and whatever else she was going to make. Our cultural understanding is that when anyone comes over, they could always sit down and eat. Everybody who came through the door had to sit at the table and eat something. That’s our culture. Every morning there was rice and beans and tortillas. Well, rice is pure sugar, or it turns to sugar in your body. That’s what it is. But who ever told me that? Whoever told my great grandmother, who used to cook the beans with lard?
They taste really good cooked in lard, too.
Are you kidding? Fantastic. It’s just that we have to realize what it does to us. That doesn’t mean you can’t eat it. That just means you don’t eat it every day. I had to come to terms with what I was doing to myself in my food, in my culture—and I love my culture. But I’ve seen what amputation does within families. Everything I’ve done through the Limb Preservation Society comes from a Latino sensibility, but the Limb Preservation Society helps everyone—black, white, brown, yellow, red, it doesn’t make a difference. That isn’t even an issue. They operate on people who have no money.
Let me tell you another little story about how this has impacted my life. About ten years ago I get a phone call from the wife of an old dear friend of mine, a brilliant guitar player named Hirth Martinez. He played with Bob Dylan. Joe Pass, the great jazz guitar player, was his mentor. His wife calls me up one day and says, “Eddie, they’re rolling Hirth into the operating room. They’re going to amputate his leg, and he asked me to call you.” I said to her, “Listen to me carefully. Please hang up the phone and walk into the operating room where they’re prepping. You’ll contaminate the room and they won’t be able to do the operation.” She said, “That’s crazy,” and I said, “I know it’s crazy, but you’ve got to stop them from doing this. Just walk in and contaminate the room by your presence. They’ll have to pull him out.”
One of my oldest friends happened to be on the board of this hospital. I called him and said, “Get over there right away and pick up Hirth Martinez.” He goes, “What?” I said, “They’re gonna amputate his leg. Take him over to Dr. Andros right now.” I hadn’t even called Dr. Andros yet.
So they get Hirth out of the operating room, they put him in a car, and they drove him straight from where he was to Valley Presbyterian, which is at least a half-hour drive. And waiting for him there are Dr. Andros and two nurses, and they’re already bringing in the other doctors who are needed to understand the vascular situation. It’s an incredible team, and each one of them has their specialty. They take him into surgery, and Dr. Andros comes out hours later and says, “Ed, we had to cut off a little piece of his big toe, but he’s still got his leg.” I cried. They had revascularized. Now, I can’t explain it all. It’s unbelievably technical. But they restructured his veins and got the blood flowing back down there.
They saved the leg, but Hirth passed away from diabetes five or six years later. He died of the disease like my father did.
What needs to happen to get more people to have access to a healthier diet, access to the exercise they need to do, the doctors they need to see?
The key to this whole thing is education, but that’s also the hardest part in the whole situation. What can we do to make people understand this? Just what we’re doing right now. I’m choosing to talk with you because your article will reach people, and it’ll empower them to not only understand it for themselves, but to tell other people. I want to make sure people understand diet is very, very important for our health—whether it be diabetes, cancer, heart disease, whatever. And the other thing is exercise. I’m coming up on 80 years old, and I just finished walking two and a half miles.
Something simple, just walking, is all you need to do. I used to go swimming. I have a rowing machine. But I go walking every day.
I can think of great films where the plot involves cancer, autism, PTSD, AIDS, and other things, but not diabetes. The stories about your father’s family and Hirth Martinez are very dramatic and could educate people about diabetes and limb loss. Is Hollywood missing an opportunity?
There have been movies made that deal with diabetes, but they haven’t had big commercial success. I agree with you, though. To me, movies are a one-of-a kind art form that attacks the subconscious mind more than any book, any live performance, any musical rendition, or anything else. Why? Because every aspect of artistic endeavor is inside of a film. It has performances, it has music, it has visual images. The director and all the different production teams jump in to make that reality come true. So the art form itself, an audio-visual event, becomes the most effective understanding of reading information and getting into the subconscious mind.
So a movie would be fantastic, but it’s so hard to make these movies. You gotta remember, this is the entertainment business, not social advancement of humanity. When we did Stand and Deliver, that was so hard to make because nobody wanted to put any money into that kind of a story. Because who’s going to go see a movie like that? Who wants to go see a movie about a school teacher who teaches inner-city kids how to take AP calculus and how to develop their brains to understand how to pass the test?
That movie did make a big impact, though.
Oh boy, did it ever. Over the last 40 years of its existence, tens of thousands of teachers all over America use it every year to motivate students and help their students understand themselves better. So it’s got to be entertaining, and it’s got to have some aspects of understanding humanity and explaining the issue to educate people who are watching it.
I’ve done that with a lot of my films, and I take a lot of pride in doing that. But you’re right, Hollywood has not paid any attention in a strong way to diabetes, or to many other areas that they can make moving, compelling stories about humanity that would be entertaining and yet still have a really strong understanding of social issues. If there could be a movie that helps people understand diabetes and amputation, that would be beautiful.
The Envelope, Please….
The Edward James Olmos Award is a highlight of the annual Global Interdisciplinary Diabetic Foot Conference (DFCon), held in Los Angeles each November. Bestowed each year since 2003, the honor has recognized the world’s most prominent innovators in diabetes education and limb preservation. Noteworthy winners include:
Alberto Piaggesi | Endocrinologist | 2024
Founder of the Diabetic Foot Valley, a pilot project to standardize diabetic foot care in northern Italy. Health organizations across Europe are now adopting the DFV model.
Frances Game | Diabetologist | 2021
Primary developer of the 3C Patch, a wound application that promotes healing in persistent, limb-threatening diabetic foot ulcers.
Stephanie Wu | Podiatrist | 2020
Trailblazing educator and researcher who gained recognition for podiatric training programs’ high level of medical and scientific rigor.
George Andros | Vascular surgeon | 2017
Helped develop new techniques in revascularization, enlarging both the patient pool and the success rate of this procedure.
Michael Edmonds | Diabetologist | 2014
Established the world’s first specialized diabetic foot clinic in 1981 and pioneered multidisciplinary care models, both of which are now global standards.
