Comment by paganel
9 years ago
Honey also works pretty well if applied immediately on the skin and if the burns are not that serious to begin with. My ex-wife managed to pour burning edible oil on her hand while she was cooking some fries, but no scar remained because we applied honey on the affected skin almost immediately.
Burns need to be kept cool and moist. Applying anything thick and cool (within reason - lotions for example) to the burn will help. Cool the burn under cold running water if possible ('take the heat out'), then put something on it to keep it moist. Anything serious requires a trip to the ER of course.
Even if you forget to put sunscreen on and get sunburned, putting sunscreen on afterwards can help keep the skin moist and improve the outcome.
Your advice is dangerous and wrong.
>> cool the burn with cool or lukewarm running water for 20 minutes – don't use ice, iced water, or any creams or greasy substances such as butter
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Burns-and-scalds/Pages/Introduc...
> You should go to a hospital A&E department for:
> all chemical and electrical burns
> large or deep burns – any burn bigger than your hand
> burns that cause white or charred skin – any size
> burns on the face, hands, arms, feet, legs or genitals that cause blisters
I was unaware that ice came out of a cold running water tap. That doesn't happen here down under.
You can definitely use creams like sunscreens or similar. True, I did overstate a bit - you don't want to use something like butter that will turn to oil and keep in the heat.
2 replies →
Honey should extract water from the area. Is sugar. Could avoid blisters formation?
Having had oil burns heal without honey I'd want to see some peer-reviewed studies on its efficacy as a burn treatment first.
Honey dressings were being used in some English NHS hospital settings.
This from 2008 isn't great, but it's not calling it woo: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/10October/Pages/Honeyandburns.as...
This from 2016 is a bit better: http://www.cochrane.org/CD005083/WOUNDS_honey-as-a-topical-t...
> There is high quality evidence that honey heals partial thickness burns around 4 to 5 days more quickly than conventional dressings. There is moderate quality evidence that honey is more effective than antiseptic followed by gauze for healing wounds infected after surgical operations.
I think "partial thickness" is called "second degree" in the US.
That's different from just pouring it on a new burn, and I definitely don't think people should do that.
The best and quickest link that I could find was this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158441/
> Having had oil burns heal without honey
I'd say you need to have Terminator-like skin in order to (relatively) quickly heal your skin (with no scars) after pouring more than half of pan of burning oil on your arm.
That would be a very serious burn, and in that situation it's important (to avoid death or loss of limb) to get the person to the nearest emergency department, and then to the nearest burns unit.
Yeah, this seems like woo. At best I would hazard to guess that the honey provides an antibiotic effect and is perhaps a slightly acidic pH causing high cell turnover.
Honey has an antimicrobial effect that's been known for thousands of years. This isn't the article I went looking for about it, but interesting all the same:
http://www.academia.edu/2189571/Pdf_6_The_antibacterial_acti...
The antibiotic effect all by itself would be nothing to scoff at. I mentioned it as a reply to a previous comment, but I don't personally think that the human skin is made to re-generate all by itself after pouring more than half of a pan of burning oil on the arm section.