How to Remove a Splinter

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Kayti Brosnan. I'm a registered nurse here in Austin, Texas, and I'm going to tell you how to remove a splinter. There's many ways you can remove a splinter. Everyone's got the way that they like. I personally see a lot of splinters out at a camp that I work at during the summer as the clinic nurse, and so my favorite way is to get around the splinter with a needle. You can...obviously, this is easier for me in a clinical setting, but if you're at home, you can use a sewing needle, and those have different gauges, smaller and bigger. So depending upon how big the splinter is, you want to just kind of get underneath it and create more of an opening for the splinter to come out. And doing this, you're help...you're helping to prevent when you actually do pull the splinter out for it to break off into smaller pieces because it doesn't have as much resistance on its way out. So it's usually the first thing that I do. It doesn't really cause any discomfort or pain because most of the time, splinters aren't all that deep, and if they are, you can actually loosen up the skin around the outside, which doesn't have a whole lot of sensation or nerves there. So that's the first thing that I do. And then the second thing I do is try to wiggle it out using a...some sort of a tweezer. So whichever one you have at home that works the best that's going to grasp the splinter the most effectively is the best one to use. And so what you really want to do is prevent the splinter from breaking off. And then once you've got the splinter out, you want to clean off the area because you don't know what it's been contaminated with through the wood or whatever has actually caused the splinter. And so use either alcohol if you have alcohol at home, or you can use peroxide. I use alcohol pads as well as a saline peroxide, a 50/50 mix. And then you can always use a band-aid if you need that afterwards. And that's my favorite way of how to remove a splinter."