ABCs 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 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 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 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:
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.
The next step is to decide if the wound is dirty.
Examples of clean wounds:
i. 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.
ii. 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.
Examples of dirty wounds:
i. 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.
ii. 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.
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.
1. 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.
2. 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 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, and it also reacts with the cell walls of the bacteria and kills them. There are very few microorganisms that will not oxidize.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Watch out for any swelling, red streaks or pussy discharge. You do not want to see any fever or other symptoms that might cause 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.
On the horse wound mentioned at the beginning of this article we peppered the wound with goldenseal and 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 will find some way of removing the bandage.
One day one of the children 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. 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 remove the tape. The tail healed, and a week later we took the tape off.
From that moment on 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.
You should also read about Goldenseal. I believe all families who prefer to treat their bodies with natural substances should keep at least a small, 4-oz. bag of goldenseal root powder in their medicine chest. If you have cayenne pepper and use it for other things, this will work almost as well. Read full article.
More Uses for Goldenseal Root Powder
I believe all families who prefer to treat their bodies with natural substances should keep at least a small, 4-oz. bag of goldenseal root powder in their medicine chest. If you have cayenne pepper and use it for other things, this will work almost as well.
The most important use of goldenseal root powder can be found on our ABCs of Wound Healing page. The information on this page is invaluable for anyone and everyone. We all experience gashes, cuts and other tragedies, and few of us want to go on antibiotics or see a physician if we do not need to. If that is a choice you have made you will find this information very helpful.
You can use goldenseal root powder for such simple things as to stop the bleeding from a razor cut to such specialized uses as drying up the umbilical cord on a newborn baby. With a newborn, the cord dries up very quickly and infection is never a problem. If you have a sinus infection and snuff a mixture of goldenseal root powder and cayenne pepper into your nostrils you will at first feel lots of tingling and then popping as the passageway opens. The entire sinus cavity will then begin opening, and lots of draining will occur. Your eyes may water at first, but I tell you, nothing beats it when you have that sinus headache. A sinus infection is far worse. This is what we use in our house, for both adults and children. I have had a total of two sinus infections in my whole life. Both times it took about one hour for the sinus to open and drain. I’d say that it worked better than any antibiotic in the country!
A pinch of goldenseal root powder added to boiled water and then cooled can be dropped in the eyes to eliminate an eye infection. This same solution can be used to rid the eye of impurities or to soothe the eyes from eyestrain. I had a dog once that contracted a terrible eye infection. The eyes of dogs have several eyelids, which I believe compound any problems. When animals get eye infections it can look really bad. This dog could not open her eye. It was all swollen shut and was not even draining. I made some very light goldenseal tea and with the aid of an eyedropper and my husband’s hands we forced the eye open just enough to drop in the tea. Pus gushed out every time we dropped the tea in, so we continued this procedure over and over until we had all the pus removed and the eye well flushed. Later on that day we repeated the entire procedure. The next morning the dog’s eye was no longer pussy or swollen; it was wide open and we never had to do anything further to the eye. Within two days it was no longer bloodshot.
Years later our entire family caught some type of flu. About three-quarters of the family developed an eye infection during the last stage of the virus. For each of them I used a light goldenseal tea. One day of flushing the eye “every time we though about it,” and the infection was gone. I have used this for babies who had clogged tear duct and developed eye infections and for pink eye as well.
Goldenseal is my basic remedy for any infection inside the body as well. If someone catches a cold or the flu, or any ailment that appears to be from an infective agent, I typically give him or her two capsules of goldenseal four times a day. Usually this means they will be on their feet within 24 hours, if not earlier.
About a year ago, someone called me troubled about a wound he had just above his knee on his inner thigh. He had scraped it months before and it became infected. He tried to keep it clean, but the infection spread. This forced him to try an over-the-counter antibiotic cream. However, the cream did not phase the infection, so he ended up making an appointment with an allopathic physician. This doctor gave him another ointment to try which seemed to work for a few days, but then the wound began to get worse. Upon another trip to the doctor he received a different antibiotic ointment to try. This new prescription worked for a few days and then the wound became worse again. Upon his third trip to the doctor they took a culture to determine what organism they were dealing with and what antibiotics they should use. On this third visit, the doctor gave his patient an oral antibiotic along with another stronger antibiotic ointment. These worked for a few days but then the wound once again began getting worse.
At this point the wound had grown to be about ½ inch deep and 2 ½ inches in diameter. It was well inflamed and was showing red streaks. This person was concerned (and he should have been). The report came back that he had pseudomonas aeruginosa in his wound. Because I have worked as a medical technologist and microbiologist, I was well familiar with this organism. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and staphylococcus aureus are the biggest culprits for developing antibiotic resistance. There are many, many nursing home patients that contract pseudomonas in their lungs, in their bedsores, and in wounds that do not respond to any antibiotics. These two organisms are masters at developing antibiotic resistance. With any antibiotic given to these patients, the organisms would develop resistance within days. The patients would often receive several different IVs containing the most current generation of antibiotics at the same time and still not see results.
What was happening to this man was that the antibiotics he was given would work for about two days until the organism developed a resistance to it and then “bounced back,” once again attacking the healthy tissues in this man’s leg.
The man asked me what I thought and I told him all the things I have written above. Then he asked me what I would do. I told him about my mother. I gave him other examples. And then I told him I would soak the wound in Epsom salts twice a day and powder the wound with goldenseal root powder or cayenne pepper.
That day he discontinued his antibiotic. He said they were not working anyway. He purchased a five-gallon bucket and found some rocks that would fit in around his foot and leg when it was in the bucket. He also purchased some Epsom salts at his local grocery store and we sent him the goldenseal root powder.
Once everything arrived, he fixed the Epsom salts solution in the bucket, placed his foot and leg inside and then placed the rocks on both sides of the leg to raise the water level. He soaked his leg faithfully two times each day and used the goldenseal in between. Within a week the wound was completely healed. Within a day you could tell the wound was closing up and getting better.
Two weeks later he called me and thanked me for the advice. It is really nice to hear back from people and know they were helped. It is my desire that these stories and information will, someday, help you, too.
