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Hello, I am Dr. Neal Schultz and welcome to DermTV.
Most of us experience a blister at one point or another. Blisters usually occur either from burns or from rubbing, the ones from burns usually on our finger, on our hand or arm because often they come from cooking. The ones from rubbing are usually from either shoes or sneakers or athletic equipment. The bottom line is if you do nothing for blister of course it's going to heal. But by not treating it you increase the chances of an infection and it's takes longer to heal. If you don’t treat it over a period of time it dries out the skin breaks, settles down, you scar across but again allowing that happened increases the chances of infection and the amount of time it takes. And if you treat the blister properly you decrease both of those.
So it doesn’t really take four years of medical education to treat a blister but there are certain steps you should follow. First of all, get a good skin disinfectant Hibiclens available without a prescription and gently but thoroughly disinfecting and cleanse the area where the blister is. In this case we’re going to assume that the blister is on the back of my hand so you would disinfect around it and then on the top. And then take some alcohol and this is 70% rubbing alcohol isopropyl and that’s what usually available in your pharmacy.
Take some on a cotton pad or a cotton puff and gently again cleanse and disinfect around the blister and then gently over the roof of the blister. Third take a needle, most of use a sewing needle and the needle needs to be sterilized. You can either boil it in water for five minutes or you could put the very tip in a flame like in the stove for three or four minutes until it turns red hot and then sterilized but of course please be careful when your sterilizing the needle to make sure that you don’t burn yourself.
Next, you want to take the needle and puncture the blister at the very bottom of the blister. Let’s assume that this is blister and you take the needle and by puncturing at the very bottom you’ll allow the blister fluid to run out the bottom and the top skin, the dead skin collapses flat down onto the base. You don’t want to remove that dead skin because it's very valuable. It serves as a very good what we call biologic dressing, makes it heal faster and helps to keep it sterile.
Next, take some antibiotic ointment, this is bacitracin you could use Polysporin or Aquaphor healing ointment and don’t put the ointment on the top of the blister rather put the ointment on a band-aid because if you put it on the band-aid and then apply the band-aid on top of the blister there’s less of a chance that you'll rub off the top surface of that dead skin which again we want to preserve. Change the band-aid and apply new ointment to a new band-aid three or four times a day and that will both speed the healing of the blister as well as helping to prevent an infection. Please join me again at DermTV.com. If you have a question please send it to me by visiting DermTV.com/question. I'm Dr. Neal Schultz and thank you for watching today.
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