Understanding the Importance of Expert Wound Care

You’ve lost count of the cuts and scrapes you’ve had over the years, and some have left behind little reminders in the form of scars. While our bodies do a great job dealing with these minor injuries, some wounds can benefit from outside help.

At Valliant Life Medical, the providers on our team are certified in wound care and excisional debridement, allowing us to help patients to heal from chronic, acute, and slow-healing wounds.

Here’s a look at what our goals are when we administer wound care and when you might want a higher standard of care for your wound.

What happens when you heal

Your skin covers an average of 22 square feet, making it your body’s largest organ. Your skin’s main job is an important one — to protect your body. So, when there’s a breach in your skin (a wound), it’s all hands on deck to accomplish a number of tasks, including:

• Stopping the bleeding
• Creating a temporary protective layer (scab)
• Controlling inflammation
• Fighting infection
• Resurfacing the wound
• Revascularization, if necessary

With minor cuts and scrapes, your body is usually pretty good at accomplishing each of these tasks, especially if you provide a little aid in the form of antibiotic cream and a dressing.

When healing isn’t so easy

There are times when healing isn’t as cut and dried as we outlined above and requires an extra healing hand. To illustrate this point, we’re going to review a few different scenarios in which expert wound care is an excellent idea.

Complex wounds

If you have a wound that’s complex, there may be some hurdles during the healing process. By complex, we’re referring to the following characteristics:

• Too long, wide, or deep (more than a half inch in any direction)
• There are exposed tissues, such as bone, muscle, or fatty tissue
• The edges are jagged

The wound’s location is also a consideration — is it in a sensitive or tricky area, such as around your eye, for example?

Preexisting health conditions

If you have an autoimmune disorder or diabetes, even small wounds can be problematic if your healing processes are compromised. For example, about 15% of people with diabetes develop a foot ulcer, and about 6% of these people will require hospitalization because of rampant infection.

Age

If you’re getting older, your skin becomes thinner and more delicate. This not only means you’re more susceptible to wounds, but these wounds become more difficult to heal.

Optimizing healing through wound care

Whatever your situation, our experts can help you get on the road to healing if you have a problematic wound. As we mentioned, we’re certified in advanced wound care and debridement, which means we know how to optimize the healing environment.

First, we remove any dead or compromised tissues that serve only to feed bacteria. Debridement of necrotic and infected tissue is the first, and arguably one of the more important, steps toward healing.

Once your wound is clean, we can then boost your body’s ability to heal with:

• Tissue equivalents
• Placental-based grafts
• Bioengineered technologies
• Extracellular matrix-based technologies
• Cell-based grafts
• Negative pressure wound therapy

As you can see, we have a number of solutions for chronic or hard-to-heal wounds.

If you’d like to learn more about our advanced wound care, we invite you to contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to schedule an appointment