At This Anaplastology Lab, Each Lifelike Limb Is a Work of Art

Mike Holt, who is 74, is an anaplastologist and owns ARTech Laboratory, a Midlothian workshop that creates custom silicone prostheses.

I grew up in construction. My dad was a contractor, my grandfather was a contractor, I was a contractor. My brother was a contractor, until he went to work at the prosthetics company Life-Like Laboratories, in Dallas, and fell in love with anaplastology. He saw how meaningful it was to patients to have realistic limbs that helped them feel like themselves again. And there were not a lot of anaplastology labs, so we started our company in my garage in 1995, and we kept working together until my brother passed away in 2016. Now we have ten employees, and we make about five hundred prostheses a year.

Anaplastology is mostly art. We don’t do any of the mechanical parts, but we make the silicone coverings that go over a prosthetic arm or leg. Most of our patients don’t live in Texas, so a prosthetist will send us everything we need to create whatever the patient needs. They’ll FedEx us photographs and a cast of the prosthesis, and we use that to sculpt a hand or finger out of wax. Once that wax model is finished, it’s captured in a mold. Then we inject that with silicone, and it goes to our artist to do the final tinting. We match the patient hair for hair, freckle for freckle. It’s an assembly line—one person does nothing but acrylic nails, making sure to match the shape and blood coloration under the nail.

Some patients have been with us since they were kids, and we’ve seen them grow through their prostheses. One patient got upset when we put hair on his prosthetic arm because he remembered when he was a kid and he didn’t have hair there. We had a lady who got a hand from us about twenty years ago, and when we recently made a replacement, it had too many wrinkles for her, even though it matched her other hand. So we redid it.

One of our patients is Lauren Scruggs Kennedy, an influencer and former model from Dallas. In 2011 she was in an accident—she got caught in an airplane propeller and lost an eye and an arm. She started a foundation for young women amputees, and she gives grants for some of their silicone coverings. The cost for a leg covering is about $11,000 to $15,000; for an arm, it’s $9,000 to $14,000. Insurance balks at paying for anything that’s called cosmetic; that’s the biggest problem we have in our business. Sometimes we are able to donate a covering or reduce the cost for a patient—especially a kid who can’t afford it.

We get Christmas cards every year from most of our patients. We get invited to their weddings, and they send pictures of their kids. It was a family business to begin with, and our patients become almost like family. That’s the fantastic part. We cannot put back what God put there in the first place, but we can help make them feel whole again.

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Mike Holt, Prosthetics Designer.” Subscribe today.