Archives
Posted by Sandy Thompson
You have no doubt incurred some sort of burn in your lifetime. Whether you’ve scalded your hand with boiling water while cooking, developed a blistering sunburn after a long day at the beach, or something worse, burns can range from slight annoyance to life-threatening.
Thanks to advances in medicine and our overall understanding of what happens when a person gets burned, we are now more than ever better equipped to treat victims of burns. This has drastically decreased the mortality rate that we see from severe burns today—in 1952, victims of more than 50 percent total body surface area burns had only a 50 percent chance of survival. Today, victims of the same severity of burns have a 98 percent chance of recovering from their injuries. This is due in large part to changes in initial assessments and procedural actions in the time shortly after a burn takes place.
While these advancements in conventional medicine have improved conditions on the more severe side of bu...