Honey Effectiveness On Wounds: How To use

Sometimes, being careless, being in an accident, or engaging in a thrill all have a single thing in common; an increased chance of suffering scrapes, cuts, or burns. Sometimes, you could quickly solve this by using a quick plaster on your knee or other methods.

On other occasions, you would require a trip to the hospital. However, for most common scrapes and cuts, honey can help wounds heal. Honey has been used for centuries as a topical antibacterial agent to treat infections from various wound types like burns, wounds, and ulcers.

Additionally, you can use honey when conventional antibacterial treatment with antiseptics and antibiotics fails. In recent years, medical practitioners have renewed their interest in honey’s medicinal properties and use.

Here’s how:

●    Fights biofilms

In recent years, there has been evidence showing that honey can inhibit planktonic cell growth and prevent biofilm formation in vitro, specifically manuka honey, which disrupts pseudomonas biofilms. Manuka honey also stops the formation of biofilms through many wound pathogens such as Streptococcus and Staphylococcus species.

●    Wound bed preparation

Honey is also effective in wound bed preparation by carefully controlling various cells to restart or facilitate timely healing. You can also use honey to address bioburden and debride devitalized tissue. Appropriate application of honey dressing allows you to manage wound-related barriers to healing.

Deep wounds, cavities, or abscesses would require more honey to penetrate deep inside the wound tissues. Therefore, before applying the honey dressing pad, you should fill the wound bed with honey.

●    Manage wound exudate

Honey also helps in reducing wound exudate amount through its anti-inflammatory ability. However, this ability increases fluid movement to the soft tissue, thus increasing surface exudate.

Additionally, you will reduce edema and pain and reduce hypertrophic scarring when you manage inflammation properly. The amount of honey that you should use is dependent on the amount of fluid that comes out of the wound.

Small amounts of exudate require a little quantity of oil application and large amounts the reverse. The dressing frequency would also change based on how fast the exudate dilutes the honey.

However, the exudate would become less as the honey works on healing the wound. Therefore, a good option would be to spread the honey in the dressing and then apply it to the wound instead of directly applying the honey to the wound.

●    Treating sores

You can use honey to treat people with diabetes having foot sores. When you apply dressing pre-impregnated with honey to diabetic foot ulcers, the healing time and antibiotics are reduced.

Also, you can treat sores and ulcers of the gum and mouth caused by herpetic gingivostomatitis (herpes virus) with honey. First, you should rinse your mouth, then swallow the honey slowly. This method is faster in healing ulcers and sores in children taking acyclovir medication.

●    Dry eyes treatment

Applying certain eye gels or eye drops such as Optimel Antibacterial Manuka Eye Gel and Optimel Manuka plus eye drops into your eye will help make your dry eye feel better. In addition, you can combine the above products with regular dry eye treatments like warm clothes and lubricant drops.

That’s a Wrap

Honey has a lot of effectiveness in helping heal wounds, burns, and skin infections that are infected. Honey also prevents non-infected people from being infected.