As I blogged about last week… I love treating skin issues.
I love taking care of skin, and I love supporting skin healing.
As a physician, skin is like magic to me.
In medicine, we see the miracle of skin repair all the time:
- You can cut it during surgery, and it will grow back together within a week.
- You can scrape it to take a biopsy, and it will re-establish an intact barrier within days.
- You can puncture it with a needle, and it will fill back in to stop bleeding within a matter of minutes… sometimes seconds.
- Skin is miraculously quick at creating new cells, removing old ones, repairing structural damage, and re-establishing blood flow.
In science, we have yet to be able to re-create anything half as magnificent as real skin, even in the most advanced laboratory on earth.
Nothing can truly substitute for your skin. For this, we should be on our knees grateful to our skin. This is completely aside from the physical appearance of our skin.
This is just that our skin allows our survival… it lovingly cares for us when we don’t even give our skin a second thought.
But what about when we do have a wound in our skin that is not healing?
This is a common medical issue for diabetic patients, so a recent medical study on a holistic way to treat non-healing skin ulcers really grabbed my attention.
The Study (published in Wounds, Feb 2017):
- Researchers enrolled 10 patients with diabetic foot ulcers and monitored healing over a 12 week period.
- Patients sprayed their diabetic foot ulcers three times daily with a sterile sea salt spray (Oceanzyme Spray.)
The Results:
- The patients using the sea salt spray had an average of a 73% reduction in wound area (which is a major amount of healing) and two of the 10 had 100% full healing within the 3 month time period.
The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) estimates almost 30 million Americans have diabetes, and that diabetes costs the US about $250,000,000 dollars a year.
The cost of treating a diabetic foot ulcer alone can be over $25,000, as many diabetic foot ulcers need prolonged treatments that including dressings, topical Rx, surgical interventions, even amputation.
Finding out that an all natural, no-Rx-needed salt water spray heals skin ulcers that well is absolutely so exciting in the world of holistic medicine…
…but maybe not so exciting for pharmaceutical companies!
Want yet another holistic approach for treating wounds?
A study published on April 12, 2012 in the International Wound Journal showed that when honey was used on all types of wounds, it:
- promoted healing
- minimized necrosis
- minimized the amount of skin that sloughed off the wound
- reduced wound size
- decreased affected area around wound
I’d be happy to use honey as a topical dressing even if it only had a small chance of helping… but it made a significant, measurable improvement in over 84% of wounds!!!!
We are talking:
- post operative wounds
- general skin wounds
- infections
- burns
- ulcers
- pressure sores and more!
Honey has well-known antimicrobial benefits, doesn’t spoil, is easy to have on hand and is portable (no refrigeration required!) so it really makes perfect sense to use as a wound dressing in children older than 12 months old.
First be sure to flush out any wound with lots of water… for a long period of time.
Then, depending on wound type you may consider a topical antihistamine, anti-inflammatory, or antibacterial dressing, and then honey.
Of course, be sure to have deeper or larger wounds evaluated by a physician.
For diabetic foot ulcers, combining the two medical study results into one treatment plan, I would recommend:
- Spraying the ulcer generously with sea salt spray
- Gently dressing the ulcer with a thin layer of manuka honey
- Then covering with a sterile bandage.
- Repeat three times a day and have wounds monitored by your in-person physician for signs of infection.
Want more holistic, medically proven ways to naturally support the health of your skin?
I’ve created an online class just for you:
My 5 Day Skin Happiness Makeover — which runs next month!
The class comes with a complete holistic skin care toolkit…
…a goodie bag filled with all the items you need to play with my very favorite skin care tools every day of the course and beyond!
The goodie bag is so awesome that you could literally throw out every skin treatment, cream and lotion and potion that you have in your bathroom right now and start totally over with only the very best, most supportive, totally holistic products that I am going to personally send you!
The course culminates in a live Q&A phone call where I will answer every single one of your skin care questions PERSONALLY.
Ask me anything!
I will tell you exactly what is going on with your skin and how to help, medically and holistically and intuitively.
Join right now to reserve your spot in this
by-reservation-only special skin care makeover!
xoxoxo, Laura