Erin Allman-Updike

So there's different calculations that we use for children and babies.

But you also could use a person's hand.

So not my hand to calculate your burn area.

Right.

But your hand to calculate yours.

Mine to calculate mine.

Our palm, so the entire surface of our hand, including our fingers on our palm, is about 1%.

Okay.

So that's considered about 1% total.

So you can use that to kind of estimate if it's less than 9% or something, you're trying to get a rough estimate.

So that's how we sort of calculate and estimate how severe a burn is.

And of course, like I said at the very top, our skin is the largest organ in our body.

So damage, even to a small portion of that organ...

has the potential to cause a whole body response.

And the response that we see really depends on the depth of that burn, the surface area of that burn, and the person who sustained that burn and what their underlying conditions is.

But we can kind of understand how this process is going to go if we understand our basic inflammatory response and how our body responds to wounds in our skin, which we've talked about on previous episodes.

I think on our maggots episode, we talked about this inflammatory response.

Because any time that our skin is wounded from a burn or a scrape or a scratch, our body follows a very predictable series of responses to try and repair that wound.

The very first thing is hemostasis, right?

We have to stop the bleeding because most of the time wounds bleed.