How to Treat a Small Cut or Scrape

Video Transcript

"You're child's been out in the playground and skinned their knee, or perhaps you were cutting carrots for dinner and you've sliced your thumb. How do you treat those injuries? My name is Beverly Bitterman, ARNP, health and wellness consultant, and I've got a couple tips and strategies for you. The first thing that you want to do is to make sure that you clean the area, particularly a dirty wound like someone out on the playground. So, it's just helpful to run warm water over that. You don't have to use a lot of friction unless there's a lot of dirt in the wound, and you don't need to use anything that stings. We don't recommend alcohol or mercuricome, or even hydrogen peroxide anymore. At this point, water and a little bit of soap is what's recommended. Once it's clean, you want to make sure that the bleeding is stopped, and so to do that you apply some pressure to the, the spot. Say it's your thumb, you want to hold, hold it tight, hold something clean and dry, even a paper towel, for, could be a minute or two before the bleeding totally stops. Once that's happened with either wound, you're ready to bandage it. And there are a variety of bandages and things out there are on the market these days. You want to pick a bandage that's big enough for the cut, and that works well with you. If you've got a latex allergy, you want to avoid latex, otherwise any, any of them that come on the market are fine. There are even some spray on bandages that might work well for your child with the skinned knee, and these are kind of interesting. They provide a protective layer over the skin. You do not necessarily need to use an antibiotic ointment, particularly for that kitchen cut on your thumb. Perhaps for the child with the skinned knee, given it's a wider area, I might be more tempted to use an antibiotic ointment on something like that. Then the idea would be to change that bandage daily, partly so you can take a peek at it and make sure it's not getting infected, and of course, if the area gets wet, you want to change the bandage. Once the wound seems to be healing, then you can take the bandage off. Your body really recovers quite well and quickly. I hope those strategies have helped. My name is Beverly Bitterman, ARNP, health and wellness consultant, and may your wound heal quickly."