Erin Allman-Updike

And the severity is a combination of the body surface area that's affected, so how much of your body got burned, and the depth of that burn.

And then, of course, we also need to look for whether there was any additional injuries or traumas, especially in the case of something like a flame burn.

You might have inhalational injuries or a chemical burn.

You might have other toxin exposures.

You could even have like blunt trauma injuries, right, depending on how the burn was sustained.

And then there's patient factors that might make someone more susceptible to severe outcomes from a less severe burn, like, say, a very young child or a very old person, etc.

Underlying health issues, so on.

Exactly.

Diabetes that might interfere with wound healing, things like that.

So let's go through how we kind of get to this severity.

We already mentioned, and a lot of us have heard of the idea of a first, second, and third degree burn.

And that is like classically how we classify burns.

And I say that we don't quite use it as much today because we now get a little bit more specific based on the thickness or the depth of the burn in our skin.

But colloquially, we still use for second, third degree.

So we'll just go a little bit more detailed, okay?

And first, I want to take us through our skin.

And we've talked about our skin on a number of episodes before, including like our retinoids episodes.

Yes.

But our skin is an incredibly important organ.

And it's a layered organ, the largest organ in our whole entire body.