Rashional analysis#

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:53:47 +0000

It's curious how the body works. After I fell on Sunday my only thought was to catch the pack up, and i didn't even look at my knee until after I'd finished. By yesterday there were large areas of partially-scabbed road rash on and around my knee that made bending it painful and I'd even started taking the lift between floors at work instead of running up the stairs. And standing on the escalators at Tube stations instead of walking. I feel so ... weak.

So, hydrocolloid dressing ("moist wound healing") is supposed to be the wonder treatment for this stuff. I have to say, I really dislike it. I know they're supposed to stop filling up with goo when they're - well, full - but in my experience they never do. Instead they force themselves open at one edge and I get yucky yellow gunk around the edges that soaks into my clothes. OK, so perhaps they're usually intended for large flat areas and expecting them to work on joints like knees and elbows is unrealistic, but really - what's the point otherwise? It's the knees and elbows that stick out - large flat areas are not even going to get most of the damage in the first place.

After my fall in Sardinia in which I scraped a load of skin off my upper lip, I had a think about the concept underlying "moist wound healing", and figured out that all I really needed was something that would ideally (a) keep the gunk in, (b) keep the air out, (c) stay in place - and that some kind of grease would probably fulfill all three requirements reasonably. Specifically, if Vaseline is good for raw skin caused by nappy rash and chapped lips, why not for raw skin caused by road rash and scraped lips too? And it seemed to work remarkably well - no scarring at all. It also has the advantage that the wound can be massaged through it - at least, this may or may not be an advantage medically speaking (it seems to be generally held as a Good Thing to massage scar tissue, but I'm not sure the same applies to disturbing the manky green (fibrin?) stuff that covers the wound in the earlier stages of healing), but it is a guilty pleasure that's almost as much fun as picking at scabs and doesn't feel as though it's nearly as damaging.

Experiments today and yesterday suggest so far that Vaseline is probably just as effective though not nearly as convenient on the knee, largely because of the necessity in many situations for clothing that stops my legs from getting cold. That said, I have happily [1] spent the last several hours sitting at home hacking up a mailing list interface for the LFNS web site and stopping periodically to admire Nature's amazing healing powers as they apply to my right leg: it's all jolly entertaining.

What else is worth knowing?

• I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice
• It's not sterile, so don't use it if the wound is not clean (personally I tend to believe modern society ha an unnatural obsession with "sterile" that's led us directly to the current crop of superbugs, that for most people white blood cells are pretty good at their job, and that provided your tetanus jabs are up to date this stuff isn't really worth worrying about until it happens - see, I told you I wasn't a doctor)
• It's not first aid for burns. The object there is to reduce the latent heat of the wound, so cold water is a better bet.

fn1. as happy as anyone can be while attempting to write in PHP, anyway. But that's a topic for another blog