Thread: Scar Treatment

Knowing a thing or two about wound healing and treatment, let me try to shed some light on this:
- Scar tissue is secondary healed tissue and differs from normal skin because a different and harder connective tissue forms under the skin as a sort of protection.
- Over time, the connective tissue rearranges and becomes softer. Scars fade away, but it takes time.
- The more new tissue that has to be formed to close the lesion after a cut, the bigger the scar will be.

Knowing all of this, the following can be done to minimalise scar formation:
- Prevent infection and minimise inflammation of the wound. This is where the triple antibiotic comes in. I prefer not to use antibiotics for these minor lesions because of the risk of bacterial resistance. Moreover, antibiotics only help against bacteriae and not other contamination of the wound. Just use Iodine, Chlorhexidine or just plain old alcohol. That is all you need to keep your cut from being infected.
- Make sure that the least possible new tissue has to be formed to close the lesion. Do this by pushing the wound edges together as close as you can and apply suture tape under tension. Under ideal circumstances, no crust forms and the skin just attaches to itself again.
- Shield the wound from the sun while healing. The surrounding skin will get a tan and the color of the newly formed skin will not match.

Doing all this will minimise the formation of scar tissue, but cannot prevent it from developping in all cases. If you have scars, this is what you can do to make them go away as fast as possible:
- As mentioned before: use sunblock on the scar tissue and the surrounding skin. Not only will it prevent the scar from getting a different tan, it also moisturises the skin and keeps it flexible.
- You can get ointments that are developped specially to treat scars. They are supposed to make them go away faster, but personally, I think they are snake oil.

Of course if they bother you that much you can seek out a plastic surgeon.