|
|
Medical professionals have made major strides in the way burns are treated, greatly improving outcomes for burn patients. Skin Substitutes and Cultured Skin An important advance in the treatment of thermal injury was the introduction of cultured skin and skin substitutes, such as Biobrane®. The burn care team first used Biobrane® in 1979. Today they are also using a new permanent skin substitute called AlloDerm®. In addition to skin substitutes, staff in the Burn Care Center has been at the forefront in the use of cultured skin. The process involves growing a patient's skin in the laboratory and expanding it from a small biopsy to 10,000 times its normal size. Physicians at University Hospital began culturing skin in the mid-1980s, and the skin became widely available in the early 1990s. "Cultured skin becomes lifesaving when someone has an 80 percent burn and you don't have much skin available to graft," says Boyd Terry, MD. "By using cultured skin or a skin substitute, we can reduce the patient's hospitalization time, pain, and morbidity." Although skin substitutes greatly have improved outcomes for burn patients, research into improved methods of caring for burn patients continues. Real skin has nerve endings, hair follicles, and sweat glands, which science cannot yet duplicate. "We still are fairly humble about how we heal a scar," notes Dr. Terry, "and we are sensitive to the fact we can't make the skin the same as it was before."
Nutritional Support for Burn Patients Nutrition is another area in which significant advances have been made in the care of burn patients. For the past 10 years, physicians have followed the approach of internally feeding the burn patient immediately after arrival. A burn injury greatly taxes the patient's body. The body responds by becoming hypermetabolic--a process that continues until the wound is covered. This extraordinary demand is met by feeding burn patients two to three times their normal intake.
Removed when the wound is healed.
|
|||||||||
|
| ||||||||||
