In your opinion, which of the following is better for treating a cut; hydrogen peroxide, honey, iodine, Neosporin, or Spam? Read on for the answer, although if you picked Spam, then just go away. When we get cut, we would like three things to happen. We want to prevent infection, stop the bleeding, and heal the wound. Most cuts don’t bleed much. They will stop on their own eventually. They also will eventually heal if we leave them alone long enough. The biggest risk posed by most wounds is infection. With some of the more vicious bugs around like MRSA (resistant staph) the fear of infection is understandable. That’s why people like to goober all kinds of creams and ointments on their cuts.
Understanding wound care is simple if you realize that it is all about caring for living cells. When you look at someone attractive and you feel that special feeling, you should realize that just about everything that you are admiring is dead. That’s right; we are covered with dead skin. When you shake hands you are rubbing your dead skin on your friend’s dead skin. When you kiss, you are kissing dead skin. Wow, you are really disgusting! But just a fraction of a millimeter beneath all of that dead flesh everything is alive and so is an open wound.
Let’s use some kind of beautiful imagery to help us here. First imagine the majestic and lovely Grand Canyon. Now imagine the Grand Canyon as a great, open wound. The canyon itself would be made up of bleeding, oozing flesh. The river rafters, tourists, and hikers tromping around in it are all bacteria. The boulders and logs are the debris that got into the wound. You get the idea. Let’s say that before we stitched up the Grand Canyon you wanted to do something about the tourists, logs, and boulders lying about. You decide to pour a few billion gallons of hydrogen peroxide over the canyon. This would immediately kill all the cells on the surface of the canyon. Now you have the Grand Canyon covered with dead meat. The dead meat would provide the perfect meal for the nasty tourists to feed upon. As they ate, they would start to reproduce right there on the sides of the Grand Canyon. Soon you would have millions of tourists building cabins and Wal-Marts every where. So what did you accomplish with your cubic mile of hydrogen peroxide? You created an epic display of a urban blight right in the middle of a now grotesque, oozing and over-developed ravine and the destruction of one of our nation’s great national parks. Nice going. There is a better way. Why not flood the Grand Canyon with cool, pure water thus sweeping away the debris and nasty humans before they can breed? That would leave the living skin cells untouched and healthy. If this somehow seems odd, then realize that there really isn’t any difference between your insides and an open wound. You wouldn’t inject hydrogen peroxide or iodine into your flesh, so you really don’t want to pour it over an open wound either. It kills cells in both cases.
The answer to the question in the first paragraph is, “None of the above”, because we now know that the best treatment is water. However if you have a irresistible compulsion to smear something on your wound, then honey is the least toxic and actually works pretty well as an antibiotic. Iodine, mercurochrome, and Neosporin are all toxic. Ironically Spam probably wouldn’t do any harm, so if you want to wear a huge slab of Spam on you cut nose, well….
