Erin Allman-Updike

There's not a huge leap then from a deep partial thickness to a full thickness burn or a third degree burn.

And this is one that extends completely through the dermis.

So the epidermal layer and the dermis are completely burned through.

all the way down into that subcutaneous tissue.

In some cases, a burn can extend all the way down into our deeper tissues, which is sometimes called a fourth degree burn, or sometimes it's just lumped under this third degree.

And that means that there's damage to the muscles or the bones, depending on how deep it goes.

These full thickness burns are not painful because all of our nerve endings have been destroyed.

And I asterisk that, Erin, because that just means that at the time of the injury, that specific area that sustained a full thickness burn, if you touch it, you will not feel that the way that if you touch a burn blister, it really hurts.

But that doesn't mean that they're not painful in the long run.

Or that you only have a third degree burn and that other parts of your body are not experiencing first and second degrees.

Exactly, exactly.

Very, very often, almost always, if someone has severe burns...

Not every part of the burn is the same degree, right?

You have a mix of burns of varying degrees or varying thicknesses on different parts of that burn, which means, yes, things are likely going to be very painful, even if parts of those burns have completely destroyed the nerve endings and everything.

Okay.

So I have a question about like surface area and degrees.

Yeah.

Because it's a big, like we just talked about, there's a mixture of different degrees or severities of the burn in different parts of your body.

So how is that calculated?

How does that get incorporated into total body surface area?