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ABCs of Wound Healing
Topic Started: Apr 4 2006, 03:32 AM (106 Views)
Ol' Griz
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Ol' Griz
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One day, years ago, when my mother was a young girl, as she was running barefoot through the horse barn, she stepped on a pitchfork. This pitchfork had been used for shoveling manure and was old and rusty. I am sure the tines were covered with microorganisms. As she stepped on the pitchfork, a tine went through the bottom of her foot and came out the top. To this day my mother still remembers the incident.



This type of wound is a nasty wound, whether it happens today or happened 64 year ago. At that time, there were no vaccines for tetanus and there were few antibiotics, yet my mother did survive the incident and it was fairly uneventful. Hollywood might have us believe that most people die from deep wounds if they do not seek medical attention, but the truth is most people in the past took care of their wounds and survived. They did it without tetanus shots and they did it without antibiotics. All you need to know are a few simple rules of basic wound hygiene.



Several years ago, a neighbor called with a horse problem. Two stallions had been fighting. One stallion had sunk his teeth into the front right shoulder of the other stallion. With great force he then pulled the skin away from the muscle. A day or two later they discovered the younger stallion with this huge flap of skin lying open.



You could see the front right muscle of the foreleg, the abdominal sack that held the internal organs in place and some of the side muscles going around the horse's girth. For at least 24 hours this had all been open to the wilderness and many microorganisms. With a few simple steps, however, I was able to repair the wound with no infection, and today you cannot even see the scar where the skin (hide) came back together.



With seven children, a herd of goats, horses, ducks and even wild animals, I have had lots of experience with wounds and natural healing.



We have had our share of gashes and wounds that most people would handle with stitches, tetanus shots, and antibiotics. Instead, we have always chosen natural healing. However, I am not a physician and am not giving you medical advice. What I have written here is nothing more than the writing of a friend sharing with you what she has learned in her own personal experiences.



Here are my steps:



1. First, stop the bleeding, if there is any. Generally this is easily done by applying pressure to the wound with a clean cloth.

Be patient. If you hold it longer than necessary, it will not hurt anything. If you keep taking the pressure off the wound and it has not stopped bleeding, you may prolong the time it takes the blood to clot.



With bad gashes and huge open wounds the clotting will happen faster if you use goldenseal root powder or cayenne pepper. There are other herbs as well that will help to stop bleeding, such as yarrow and shepherd's purse. Any herb with astringent properties can be used. However, in most cases simply applying pressure with a little patience is sufficient.



2. The next step is to decide if the wound is dirty.

a. Examples of clean wounds:

The other day, one of our employees had his finger under a pallet when the truck driver set it down. The pressure of 1,500 pounds on the end of that finger flattened it, causing breaks in the skin on both sides just from the pressure. From the breaks, once the bleeding had stopped you could see deep inside the finger. However, this wound was not a dirty wound because there had been no object covered with microorganisms inside the cavity.



A few years ago, we were looking at a house, and one of our children was running through the basement and hit his brow on the corner of a countertop. The pressure of the hit split open the brow, and since the facial skin does not attach to the muscles there, the skin just lay open and the lower edge of the cut rested on the eyelid. It looked awful, but this is another example of a clean wound.



b. Examples of dirty wounds:

In northern Minnesota, if your car breaks down and it is 30 below zero this can be life threatening and dangerous. People who live here know this, and everyone stops to help when a person is stranded. Unlike in a big city, in northern Minnesota there are few policeman, sheriffs or state troopers. There is little traffic as well, so if you see someone in need, you stop. Well, we were on our way somewhere in our old, red Suburban on a cold day and picked up a man whose car had broken down.



In the back of the Suburban were several sacks of garbage to go to the recycling plant. Some of the children had to crawl across these sacks to move to another seat to make room for the stranger. One of the children crawled across a garbage sack containing broken glass and received a large cut on his knee. This is a dirty cut. Anytime an object is inserted past the skin creating a wound, the cut should be considered dirty.



Ken was tearing apart a kennel we had built for puppies in our basement in a house we had sold. The new owners wanted it removed. While doing this he stepped on a nail protruding from board. The nail went deep into his foot and the wound was quite painful. There had been lots of puppy excretions in this kennel, and the nail was definitely not clean.

This is another example of a dirty wound.



3. If the wound is dirty, it needs to be cleaned and it will need to heal from the inside out. This generally means soaking and oftentimes it means using hydrogen peroxide. It also is aided by the use of herbs.



4. Soaking the Wound:

Soaking allows the wound to cleanse and keeps it from healing on the outside. You do not want the skin to heal first. The really dangerous organisms, which cause things like tetanus and gangrene, are facultative anaerobes. This means they do not grow in the presence of oxygen. They grow in wounds that have scabbed over. This allows the inner part of the gash to become very low in oxygen and an environment in which facultative anaerobes can grow. However, as long as the wound heals from the inside out, you will not have this problem. Soaking is mandatory for any deep wound for it to heal properly.



a. My favorite soaking agent is Epsom salts. This is the soaking agent my grandparents used on my mother. They soaked her foot twice a day in Epsom salts for a week, that is all they did.



b. Soaking in just warm water can work. Soaking in pau 'd arco tea, hibiscus tea, comfrey tea, or many other herbal teas also works.



5. Cleaning the wound:

If you soak the wound and there is still dirt and foreign matter in the wound, this has to be removed. Usually soaking cleans the wound fairly well and further work is not necessary. If any foreign material is in the wound, it must be removed, or the wound will be open to infection and will not heal.



a. Do not use isopropyl alcohol. This alcohol cannot be neutralized by the liver and is very toxic to the body. Every year there are a few alcoholics who become desperate for a drink and end up purchasing isopropyl alcohol. Within a very short time they are found dead. It doesn't matter that commercial perfumes, deodorants, body sprays, aftershaves and other items have isopropyl alcohol. It is dangerous. The FDA does not allow it in any food. Why they allow it on skin products, I do not know. I guess it is believed that what goes on the skin is not absorbed into the body, but rather evaporated. To a certain extent this may be true, but some does get absorbed into our blood stream and tissues. In this polluted world, it is just best to stay away from isopropyl altogether.



b. Use hydrogen peroxide instead. This substance works through a reaction in which the H_2 O_2 becomes H_2 O and O_ (water and oxygen).

The free oxygen will attach to molecules present and oxidize them. Free

Oxygen reacts with both red and white blood cells, and it also reacts with the cell walls of the bacteria and kills them. There are very few microorganisms that will not oxidize.



c. Next, powder the wound with goldenseal root powder or cayenne pepper. Other herbs such as comfrey or plantain can be used as well.

The goldenseal and cayenne have astringent and antimicrobial properties. They work remarkably well and ensure that the wound will not become infected. Comfrey and plantain are cell proliferators that speed the healing process.



d. Since the wound is a dirty, deep wound, you will need to soak the wound at least twice a day and recover the wound with goldenseal or cayenne each time. You want to make sure the wound heals from the inside out; hence, soaking is essential.



6. Watch out for any swelling, red streaks or pussy discharge.

You do not want to see any fever or other symptoms that might signal that an infection has gone systemic. Even though these things are not expected, you still want to look for them.



If the wound is a clean wound, you can just powder the wound well with the herbs and pull the tissues back together without doing a soak. In this case, soaking will actually introduce organisms into the cut. If you are careful to bring the two edges of the cut together correctly the closure line will be barely detectable once it is healed. It should, in the long run, be much less detectable than if you had selected to get stitches. Our experience is that, after a year or two, you cannot see the scar.



All the clean wounds we tackle here in our family are done this way. We simply powder the wound, getting as much of goldenseal root inside the wound as possible, and then bind the tissues together. I keep a stash of butterfly bandages here to bring the tissues together just perfectly.



[Caution: Do not wait to consult a medical professional in cases of severe wounds and minor wounds that fail to heal properly. Failure to seek medical advise could lead to serious complications, infection, illness and even death.]



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Submitted by Soaring Eagle Danysh




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Loveandbeloved
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Good ol' Epson salts! Great for sore muscles, too.

I didnt know this about cayenne pepper or goldenseal - great info.

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