Wound care

Greetings friends of Steemit and Healthy Steem

Wikimedia

An injury to the body that typically involves a laceration or a breakdown of the membrane with damage to the underlying tissues.

It's an open wound in the skin depending on the size and location we classify it as different stages. So a stage one ulcer is basically an ULCER STAGES ulcer that involves not even through the skin a little bit of redness in the skin area. Here stage two goes through with the partial thickness of the skin, stage three going through the skin into the fat underneath it but the muscle and bone is stable and stage four is when the injury goes all the way through the skin involving the muscle and bone and such.

Now wounds can typically be divided into acute wounds and chronic wounds. Luckily most of the wounds are what we call an acute wound either after an injury or after surgery whereas the chronic wounds the wounds that have been there for a long period of time and there's some problem that's preventing it from healing and by definition if a wound's been there for more than six weeks we consider that a chronic wound so this is an example of an acute wound.

ACUTE WOUND HEALING

The acute wound healing is a pretty regulated cascade and it follows a set pattern you have hemostasis where basically the bleeding initially stops then we go through the inflammatory phase and proliferative phase and remodeling phase which is how the scar forms in the scar matures.

CHRONIC WOUND HEALING

Whereas with the chronic wound that normal process isn't working properly for most of these wounds there is a balance between the wound healing and the collagen forming and the wound breaking down and if that balance is not working properly then you have problem wounds so there's too much wound breakdown you get a chronic wound.

Wikimedia

If there's too much scar buildup then you get a hypertrophy or keloid scars so they're both the two ends of the same spectrum as far as the wound healing process goes so with wound failure it's not one thing it's usually a combination of a bunch of things that comes together.

So you have an infection you have ischemia or poor blood supply and not enough oxygen. Recurrent injuries are the same injury happening over and over again and cellular failure like in situations like diabetes all of these come together to form what we call chronic inflammation and that results in a problem wound.

There are lots of different types of problem wounds right the three common ones are associated with pressure bed sores are pressure ulcers, venous ulcers and diabetic ulcers so pressure also as a bed source are very common in older debilitated patients we see them anywhere from two to ten percent of patients that are in the hospital and up to a quarter of the patients that are in long-term.

Diabetic Neuropathic Ulcers

Now diabetes is the biggest culprit of them will develop an ulcer on their leg during their lifetime and the majority of those can potentially progress to worsening conditions in fact the majority of the amputations that occur in patients usually start off with a foot ulcer and then they progress on to needing an amputation because they're not taken care of properly.

WOUND MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES

Provide a good environment locally for it to heal right that sounds very simple but it gets complicated when we look at all the things that prevent the wound from healing properly.

NUTRITION

Make sure they're getting adequate calories adequate protein because those are the building blocks to heal a wound but we also need vitamins and minerals so in patients that have poor healing.

Thank you for reading my post.

I would like to invite three fellow Steemians to participate in the contest
@chiagoziee
@eveetim
@radleking

CC @khursheedanwar