Some home remedies persist as healing enhancers, although they have rather disadvantages, are ineffective or even achieve the opposite:
- Alcohol on an open wound burns strongly. Therefore, especially small children should not be treated with alcohol-based disinfectants: The experience remains unforgotten and next time you will have great difficulty persuading the little ones to keep still. Ask in your pharmacy for painless disinfectants.
- Wound powder: you should not treat a bleeding wound with wound powder. The fine granules act like countless, tiny foreign bodies that disturb the wound healing sensitive.
- Honey: Although honey really has a mild disinfecting effect. However, it may also contain the spores of dangerous bacteria (clostridia), which multiply in the wound and whose toxins can be dangerous, especially to small children. Therefore: do not give on wounds!
- When dabbing wounds with plant stems or leaves, bacteria and other undesirable substances can get into the wound and cause allergic reactions. However, crushed leaves of daisies or ribwort help against insect bites.
- Flour does not belong on wounds or burns: It has no cooling or healing effect, but delays wound healing.
How does a wound heal?
When bleeding occurs, the injured vessel itself forms the first provisional wound closure: its wall contracts, reducing the size of the hole. Then platelets rush in and clump together to plug the gap. These activities attract the clotting factors floating in the blood and form a kind of glue, fibrin, at the site. This seals the platelet plug, thus closing the hole in the vessel until healing processes restore the structure of the vessel wall within a few days.
When are wounds sutured?
If the edges of the wound are directly adjacent, the body can join them together (primary wound healing). If, on the other hand, a larger wound gap must be bridged, the body initially fills this gap with replacement tissue. Later, a scar develops (secondary wound healing). For this reason, injuries in which the skin has been completely severed and in which the wound edges are gaping apart are sutured or stapled: the doctor brings the edges as close together as possible to keep the healing time as short as possible and the formation of scars to a minimum.
