Erin Allman-Updike

Scrapes, cuts, etc.,

Our body's response to burn injuries is actually fairly unique.

Even though it is still the same inflammatory response, it is also unique.

It's kind of interesting.

And what I really think and what I took away from digging really deep into this is that what burns really show us is just how incredible and how important of an organ our skin is.

And how severe damage to that skin has life-threatening consequences and long-lasting consequences.

So I'm going to walk us through the types of burns that we can see, burn severity, and how we actually determine severe versus minor or major versus minor burns, and what is happening to our whole entire body as a result of a burn injury, and then save the, like, what do we do about these burns for next week's episode.

Okay?

So a lot of different things can actually cause the type of damage that we would refer to as a burn.

And the source of a burn really does matter a lot because the pattern of injury that you see can be really different depending on the source of that burn.

So as an example, electrical burns, which we've talked about in our lightning episode, we talked a lot about electric burns.

They can cause really severe, deep damage to our internal structures with very minimal visible surface injury.

But those are still going to be burn injuries, but deeper.

A burn from a chemical, like say a strong acid, might cause coagulation necrosis.

So your blood vessels are all clotting and all your blood is clotting, while a burn from an alkaline chemical might actually liquefy your tissues completely.

Whoa.

Yeah.

So burns from chemicals are going to act a little bit differently.

And they might differ in how we need to treat them.

You can think of frostbite as a type of cold burn, and those need to be rewarmed and watched.