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A B C’s of Wound Healing
Topic Started: Sep 7 2007, 04:32 PM (130 Views)
Selahgal
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A B C’s of Wound Healing

One day, years ago, when my mother was a young girl, as she was running barefoot through the horse barn, she stepped on a pitch fork. This pitch fork 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 coming 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 years 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 wound 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 a tetanus shots and they did it without antibiotics. All you need to know is a few simple rules and 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 and 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. Yet with a few simple steps I was able to repair the wound with no infection and today you can not 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 have stitches, tetanus shots, and antibiotics for. 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 that the writing of a friend sharing with you what she has learned in her own personal life.

Here are my steps:
First you have to 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 shepard’s purse. Any herb with astringent properties can be used. However, in most cases simply applying pressure with a little patience is sufficient.

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

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 1500 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 running through the basement 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 laid open and the lower edge of the cut rested on the eyelid. It looked awful, but this is another example of a clean wound.

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 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 to pick-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. On the way 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 sticking out of a 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 an example of another dirty wound.

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

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 facultive 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.

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. In all honesty that is all they did.

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

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 is open to infection and will not heal.

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, after shaves 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 all together.

Instead use hydrogen peroxide. The action of this substance is that the H2O2 becomes H2O 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, but it also reacts with the cell walls of the bacteria and kills them. There are very few microorganisms that will not oxidize.

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 will assure you that the wound will not become infected. Comfrey and plantain are cell proliferators. They speed the healing process.

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 that the wound heals from the inside out and the soaks will cause this to happen.

You do not want to see any swelling, red streaks, pussy discharge. You do not want to see any fever, etc or things that might cause you to think 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 ever doing a soak. Doing a soak 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 powdered 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.

On the horse wound mentioned at the beginning of this article we peppered the wound with goldenseal and then used duct tape to bind the skin together. Then we wrapped the horse all the way around its girth to make sure he did not rub against a tree and try to take the bandage off himself. If you are working with an animal it is always wise to wrap tape totally around the animal otherwise they find some way of removing the bandage.

One day we had a child that slammed the door on a dog cutting off the last 6 inches of her tail. Blood shot out of the tail in a steady stream and it was very hard to get it to stop bleeding. Even after hours of holding the tail if I let the dog go and she wagged her tail the artery would open back up again. If we bandaged the tail with pressure it would stop but the dog would get her teeth on that heavy bandage and take if off no matter how hard we had it wrapped and no matter how much fur it pulled off. So we pulled the tail back onto the side of the dog and attached it to her body. Then we duct taped it to her and duct taped around her middle to hold it in place. For a while she went around in circles trying to get to it, but try as she might, she could not get the tape off. The tail healed and a week later we took the tape off.

From that moment this dog was always very careful about coming in the house. She would make sure we wanted her in and then she would bolt through the door at full speed to make sure her tail would not get caught again.

Goldenseal powder is yellow-green in color. A little bit goes a long way. I have used 5 year old powder that was merely stored in a cabinet at room temperature with great success. While many herbs, especially when powdered, loose much of their medicinal qualities when stored long term at room temperature, goldenseal is so powerful, it seems to still be useful even after extended storage. To keep it the freshest, however, this powder can be frozen or refrigerated. Generally this greatly extends the shelf-life of any herb.

The taste of goldenseal is somewhat bitter. In judging the quality of the root powder I look at color and taste. The stronger, more vibrant, the color and the stronger, more bitter, the taste the fresher this herb is.

http://www.regaininghealthnaturally.com/Si...und-healing.htm
Don't be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all human understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. - Philippians 4:6-7
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