Wound Healing: What Actually Speeds Repair

Few subjects attract more folklore than wound care. Everyone's grandmother had a rule — let it breathe, keep it covered, put butter on the burn, never get it wet — and half of those rules contradict the other half. Meanwhile the supplement aisle promises that this cream or that capsule will make skin knit faster. The truth is both more boring and more useful: your body already knows how to heal a wound, and it runs the same four-phase program every time. What you can actually do is remove the obstacles — keep the wound clean and moist, eat enough protein, don't smoke, control blood sugar — and add the handful of natural options that have real evidence behind them, honey being the standout. This article walks through what genuinely speeds repair, what genuinely slows it, and what is mostly marketing, with the evidence graded honestly at every step.

One thing before anything else: some wounds need a professional, not a home remedy. The red-flag list below comes before the nutrition and the honey for a reason — read it first if you're deciding what to do about a wound right now.

Table of Contents

  1. The Four Phases of Healing
  2. First Aid Fundamentals That Beat Any Supplement
  3. When a Wound Needs a Professional Today
  4. Protein and Calories
  5. Vitamin C and Collagen
  6. Zinc, Honestly
  7. Honey — the Best-Evidenced Natural Dressing
  8. Silver Dressings
  9. Other Adjuncts, Honestly Graded
  10. What Slows Healing
  11. Scars
  12. Research Papers and References
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

The Four Phases of Healing

Every wound — a paper cut, a surgical incision, a scraped knee — heals through the same four overlapping phases. Knowing them turns a mysterious process into something you can actually picture, and it explains why the advice in the rest of this article works. You can watch the whole sequence run as an interactive animation on this site's wound healing visualization.

1. Hemostasis (minutes). The moment a blood vessel is cut, it clamps down, and platelets — tiny cell fragments in your blood — pile into the breach and stick together. A protein mesh of fibrin weaves through the platelet plug and locks it in place. This is the clot, and it's more than a stopper: it's the temporary scaffold everything else will build on, and it's loaded with chemical signals that summon the next crew.

2. Inflammation (roughly days 1–4). The redness, warmth, swelling, and tenderness around a fresh wound are not signs something is going wrong — they are the demolition-and-defense crew arriving. Blood vessels near the wound become leaky on purpose, letting immune cells flood in. Neutrophils kill bacteria; macrophages eat debris, dead tissue, and spent neutrophils, then switch roles and start issuing construction orders. A wound that skips or shortchanges this phase (as happens with heavy steroid use) heals poorly — but a wound stuck in this phase for weeks is what we call a chronic wound.

3. Proliferation (roughly days 4–21). Now the rebuilding. Fibroblasts move in and spin out collagen — the rope-like protein that gives skin its strength. New capillaries sprout to feed the construction site, forming the bumpy pink tissue called granulation tissue. Skin cells (keratinocytes) crawl in from the wound edges to resurface the gap — and here's a key fact: they can only crawl across a moist surface. A dry, scabbed wound forces them to burrow underneath the crust, which is slower. This single fact is the basis of modern moist wound care.

4. Remodeling (weeks to a year or more). The first collagen laid down is quick and disorganized — type III, thrown down like sandbags. Over months, the body replaces it with stronger, better-aligned type I collagen and prunes away the extra blood vessels. This is why scars fade from red to pale. Healed skin never fully regains its original strength; mature scar tissue reaches only about 80 percent of uninjured skin's tensile strength, which is why a healed area deserves some ongoing respect.

Everything else in this article is about one thing: keeping these four phases running on schedule.

Back to Table of Contents

First Aid Fundamentals That Beat Any Supplement

No capsule, cream, or superfood will do as much for a minor wound as getting the basics right in the first hour and the first week. The basics are cheap and unglamorous, which is why nobody advertises them.

Stop the bleeding with direct pressure. Press a clean cloth or gauze firmly on the wound and hold it — continuously, without peeking — for 10 to 15 minutes. Lifting the cloth every minute to check restarts the clock, because it tears away the forming clot. Elevating the wounded part above the heart helps. Bleeding that soaks through and keeps coming despite honest, sustained pressure is an emergency — see the red flags.

Irrigate with clean water. The single most useful anti-infection step is physically flushing dirt and bacteria out. Run clean, drinkable tap water over the wound generously — think of dilution, not disinfection. Clinical trials comparing drinkable tap water with sterile saline for wound cleansing have generally found no difference in infection rates, so don't wait for special supplies. Skip the old-fashioned harsh antiseptics inside the wound: hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol kill bacteria in a dish, but in a wound they also damage the fragile new cells doing the healing, and they sting badly for nothing. Soap is for the skin around the wound, not the raw surface itself.

Keep it moist and covered — "let it air out" is backwards. This is the piece of grandmother-wisdom most worth un-learning. In 1962, researcher George Winter showed in a famous experiment that wounds kept moist under a film re-epithelialized roughly twice as fast as wounds left open to dry and scab. A scab is not a badge of healing; it's a dry obstacle the new skin cells have to tunnel under. After cleaning, apply a thin layer of plain petrolatum (Vaseline) and cover with a bandage or non-stick dressing, refreshing it daily or when dirty. Moist, covered wounds heal faster, hurt less, and scar less.

Petrolatum vs. antibiotic ointment. For a clean minor wound, plain petrolatum performs about as well as triple-antibiotic ointment in the trial evidence — the moisture is doing most of the work. There's also a real downside to the antibiotic ointments: neomycin (in most "triple antibiotic" products) is a leading cause of allergic contact dermatitis. The cruel joke is that the allergy looks exactly like an infected wound — red, itchy, oozing — leading people to apply more of the thing causing it. Bacitracin can do the same. Plain petrolatum essentially never causes this. Reserve antibiotic ointment for wounds that were dirty or are showing early trouble, and stop if the surrounding skin gets red and itchy.

Then leave it alone. Picking scabs, repeatedly "checking" under dressings, and re-injuring the area restart phases the wound already finished. Change the dressing, keep it clean, and let the program run.

Back to Table of Contents

When a Wound Needs a Professional Today

Natural wound care has a domain, and it's the minor wound. The following belong in urgent care, your doctor's office, or the emergency room today — not under honey, not "watch and wait":

None of the rest of this article applies until a wound like these has been seen. Home care and natural adjuncts come after professional care, not instead of it.

Back to Table of Contents

Protein and Calories: the Most Underrated Factor

If the supplement industry could bottle this section, it would — but protein is cheap, so nobody markets it. Healing is construction, and construction consumes materials and fuel at rates that surprise people. Collagen is protein. New skin cells are protein. Antibodies and immune cells are protein. A healing body up-regulates its protein turnover, and a significant wound — surgery, a pressure sore, a serious burn — raises both calorie and protein needs well above baseline.

Wound-care and pressure-injury guidelines commonly suggest roughly 1.2 to 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day for someone healing a significant wound — half again to nearly double the standard 0.8 g/kg maintenance recommendation. For a 175-pound (80 kg) person, that's around 95–120 grams of protein a day: eggs, fish, meat, yogurt, lentils, and beans at every meal, not a garnish. Reviews of nutrition in chronic wounds consistently identify protein-energy malnutrition as one of the most common correctable reasons a wound stalls, particularly in older adults, whose appetite and protein intake often quietly decline.

This is why crash dieting stalls wounds. A body in a steep calorie deficit starts economizing, and a healing wound is metabolically expensive. Aggressive weight-loss dieting — especially low-protein dieting — while recovering from surgery or a significant wound is asking the construction crew to build while you cancel the material deliveries. If you're actively healing, eat at maintenance or a bit above, protect protein intake first, and postpone the diet a few weeks. (Weight loss itself remains worthwhile — the point is timing.)

Two amino acids, arginine and glutamine, are marketed specifically for healing, and specialized "immunonutrition" formulas containing them are sometimes used around surgery and for pressure injuries. The evidence is genuinely mixed — some trials of arginine-containing supplements in pressure ulcers show faster healing, others don't, and it's hard to separate the arginine from the extra protein and calories that come with it. Fair summary: meeting total protein and calorie needs is the established part; the specific amino acids are a reasonable maybe.

Back to Table of Contents

Vitamin C and Collagen

Vitamin C's role in healing is not a supplement-industry story — it's one of the oldest and most dramatic findings in nutrition. In scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency disease that killed sailors by the thousand, one of the classic signs was that old, long-healed wounds broke open again. Scars that had been quietly holding for years fell apart. That happens because collagen is not a build-it-once material: the body continuously maintains and remodels it, and without vitamin C the maintenance fails.

The mechanism is precise. The enzymes that stabilize collagen — prolyl hydroxylase and lysyl hydroxylase — require vitamin C as a cofactor. They add hydroxyl groups to the amino acids proline and lysine along the collagen chain, and those hydroxyl groups are what let three collagen strands twist into their signature triple helix and then cross-link into strong fibers. Without vitamin C, the body still makes collagen chains, but they're floppy, under-hydroxylated, and weak — rope that unravels under load. You can watch this assembly line, and what happens when vitamin C is removed from it, in the interactive vitamin C and collagen animation.

The honest clinical picture: correcting a deficiency clearly helps; megadosing a replete person is not well supported. Outright deficiency is uncommon but far from extinct — it shows up in smokers (smoking burns through vitamin C), older adults on tea-and-toast diets, people with alcohol dependence, restrictive eaters, and some patients with malabsorption. In anyone healing poorly, it's a legitimate thing to check and cheap to fix. Beyond repletion, trials of extra vitamin C for wound healing in well-nourished people are sparse and unconvincing, though short-term supplementation is low-risk. The food-first route — citrus, peppers, broccoli, berries — also delivers the rest of the produce package. More on the nutrient itself at this site's Vitamin C article.

Back to Table of Contents

Zinc, Honestly

Zinc earns its association with wound healing — and almost every popular presentation of it oversells the practical conclusion. Both halves deserve to be stated plainly.

The real biology: zinc is a cofactor for hundreds of enzymes, including the DNA and RNA polymerases that dividing cells depend on — and a wound is one of the most cell-division-intensive projects the body runs. Zinc participates in every phase of healing: membrane repair and clotting, immune cell function, the matrix-remodeling metalloproteinase enzymes (the "MMPs" — metallo- because of the zinc), fibroblast proliferation, and re-epithelialization. Zinc deficiency demonstrably impairs healing, and deficiency is not exotic: low intake in older adults, vegetarian and vegan diets (phytates block absorption), inflammatory bowel disease and other malabsorption, alcohol dependence, diuretic use, and the losses from large burn wounds themselves.

The honest trial picture: giving zinc to people who are not deficient has little demonstrated benefit. The randomized trials of oral zinc for wound healing — mostly small, older studies in leg ulcers — found no clear overall benefit, with hints of benefit concentrated in participants who started out zinc-deficient. That pattern (deficiency harms; surplus doesn't help) is the norm for nutrients, and zinc follows it. Topical zinc oxide has some modest supportive evidence in leg ulcers and is a reasonable, gentle barrier ingredient, but it isn't a dramatic accelerant either.

Practical version: if you plausibly fit a deficiency category or a wound is healing slowly, it's reasonable to ask your doctor about zinc status and to correct genuinely low intake. What's not supported is high-dose zinc as a routine "healing booster" — and it isn't harmless: sustained intake above about 40 mg/day (the adult upper limit) can induce copper deficiency, which causes anemia and its own problems. Weeks, not months; correction, not megadosing. Full details on food sources, testing, and dosing are on the Zinc article.

Back to Table of Contents

Honey — the Best-Evidenced Natural Dressing

If one natural remedy deserves the crown here, it's honey — not because it's magic, but because it's the one with a serious modern evidence base, including randomized trials and a Cochrane systematic review. Honey has been used on wounds since ancient Egypt; unusually, the modern data partly vindicates the tradition.

Why it works: honey is a supersaturated sugar solution, so it osmotically pulls fluid from the wound bed, denying bacteria water while drawing lymph outward through the tissue. It's acidic (pH roughly 3–4.5), which inhibits many wound bacteria. An enzyme the bees add, glucose oxidase, slowly generates small amounts of hydrogen peroxide — a steady antibacterial trickle rather than the tissue-damaging flood of the brown bottle. And Manuka honey (from New Zealand's Leptospermum scoparium) adds methylglyoxal (MGO), an antibacterial compound that persists even when the peroxide activity is neutralized. All of this while keeping the wound moist — the first principle of modern wound care.

What the evidence actually shows: the 2015 Cochrane review (Jull and colleagues, 26 trials, over 3,000 participants) concluded there is moderate-quality evidence that honey heals partial-thickness burns roughly four to five days faster than conventional dressings, and moderate-quality evidence that it heals infected post-surgical wounds faster than antiseptic washes plus gauze. That is a real, clinically meaningful effect — and it is also where the confident claims should stop. For venous leg ulcers, honey did not show clear benefit, and for most other wound types (pressure ulcers, diabetic ulcers, mixed chronic wounds) the evidence was low or very low quality, so honest answer: unknown. Honey is a good dressing with specific proven niches, not a universal accelerant.

Medical-grade vs. the pantry jar: wound-care honey (Medihoney and similar) is gamma-irradiated to sterilize it, standardized for antibacterial activity (Manuka products carry UMF or MGO ratings), and formulated into gels and impregnated dressings that stay put. Raw pantry honey can contain Clostridium botulinum spores — the same reason infants under one year must never be fed honey — and while documented wound botulism from honey is rare, putting an unsterilized food product into broken skin is a needless gamble when sterilized products are inexpensive. For anything more than the most trivial scrape, use medical-grade.

When NOT to use honey: on any wound in the red-flag list (it is not a substitute for debridement, stitches, or antibiotics); on deep punctures or cavities you can't see the bottom of; on serious burns, which need professional assessment first; and if you have a true allergy to honey or bee products. People with diabetes should involve their care team for any significant wound regardless of dressing choice. Expect some drawing sensation; stop if a wound worsens. This site covers the topical evidence in depth at Honey for Wound Healing, and the food itself at the Honey article.

Back to Table of Contents

Silver Dressings

Silver is genuinely antimicrobial — silver ions disrupt bacterial membranes, enzymes, and DNA — and silver-containing dressings, creams, and nanoparticle formulations are real, mainstream tools in burn units and wound clinics. That mainstream status makes the honest evidence summary all the more interesting: it's thinner than the shelf space suggests.

Where silver is actually used: heavily colonized or infected wounds, burns at risk of infection, and chronic wounds where bacterial burden (including biofilm) seems to be stalling healing. Silver sulfadiazine cream was the default burn dressing for decades; modern practice has shifted toward silver-impregnated foam and mesh dressings that release ions slowly and need fewer painful changes.

What the evidence shows: a Cochrane review of topical silver for preventing wound infection (Storm-Versloot and colleagues, 2010) found insufficient evidence that silver dressings or creams prevent infection or speed healing — and notably, several burn trials found wounds treated with silver sulfadiazine healed slower than with non-silver dressings, likely because the cream is mildly toxic to the regenerating cells too. Silver, in other words, is a weapon against an actual bacterial problem, not a routine accelerant for clean wounds. Used on an infected wound, short-term, it has a defensible role; slathered on everything preventively, the evidence doesn't back it, and indiscriminate use raises reasonable concerns about bacterial silver resistance.

Two practical cautions: silver products are for short courses on problem wounds, ideally with professional guidance — if a wound is bad enough to need silver, it's usually bad enough to need eyes on it. And drinking colloidal silver does nothing for wounds (or anything else) and can cause argyria, a permanent blue-gray discoloration of the skin. Topical, targeted, temporary — that's silver's evidence-based lane. The full story, including the nanoparticle research, is at this site's Silver Nanoparticles article.

Back to Table of Contents

Other Adjuncts, Honestly Graded

A handful of other natural options have enough research to be worth discussing — none has honey's evidence base. Grades below are for the wound-healing use specifically.

Aloe vera — grade: promising for minor burns; unproven elsewhere. Aloe's inner-leaf gel is soothing, cooling, and moisturizing, with polysaccharides (acemannan) that show wound-supportive activity in lab and animal studies. A 2007 systematic review of burn trials found aloe-treated partial-thickness burns healed on the order of a week faster than controls — but the underlying trials were small and methodologically weak, and the 2012 Cochrane review of aloe for acute and chronic wounds concluded there is simply not enough high-quality evidence to say. Reasonable for minor sunburns and first-degree burns (it certainly beats doing nothing and feels better); not established for anything serious. Use the plain gel, not scented after-sun products. Details at the Aloe Vera article.

Centella asiatica (gotu kola) — grade: promising but thin. This is the herb with the most interesting collagen story: its triterpene compounds (asiaticoside, madecassoside, asiatic acid) stimulate fibroblast collagen synthesis in laboratory studies, and a standardized extract (TECA) has a long history in European and Asian wound and scar preparations. Human trials exist — for stretch marks, small wounds, and scar quality — but they're mostly small and varied in design, so dermatology reviews call the evidence encouraging rather than established. As a topical cream on closed or minor wounds it's a reasonable experiment; as an oral supplement for healing, evidence is weaker still. See the Gotu Kola article.

Turmeric / curcumin — grade: preclinical. Curcumin does interesting things to every phase of wound healing in cell and animal studies — antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, pro-collagen. Human wound trials are few, small, and mostly use special formulations, and oral curcumin is famously poorly absorbed. The traditional practice of dusting turmeric powder into open wounds is not recommended — it stains, it's not sterile, and it can irritate. If the lab promise translates to people, it will most likely be via engineered topical formulations; that research is ongoing.

Bromelain — grade: real niche in hospitals; limited for bruising at home. This pineapple-stem enzyme mix is the rare herbal product with a hard clinical foothold: a concentrated bromelain-based gel is approved in the US and Europe for enzymatic removal of dead tissue (eschar) from serious burns — hospital use only. The home-use claim is different: oral bromelain for bruising and swelling after surgery or injury. Small trials, mostly around dental and cosmetic surgery, suggest modest reductions in swelling and bruise duration; the evidence is limited and doses varied. It's plausible and generally well tolerated, but caution: bromelain has mild blood-thinning activity, so skip it if you take anticoagulants or are about to have surgery, unless your surgeon agrees.

Back to Table of Contents

What Slows Healing

Removing an obstacle usually helps a wound more than adding an enhancer. These are the obstacles, in rough order of importance.

Smoking — the biggest one. Nothing legal you can buy sabotages wound healing like tobacco. Nicotine constricts the small vessels that feed the wound; carbon monoxide hijacks the hemoglobin that should be delivering oxygen; and the combination starves the most oxygen-hungry construction site in your body. A large systematic review and meta-analysis (Sørensen, 2012) found smokers suffer significantly more post-surgical wound complications — infection, tissue death, wound breakdown, delayed healing — and that quitting before surgery measurably reduces the risk. Surgeons ask patients to stop about four weeks before elective operations for exactly this reason. If you smoke and you're healing from anything, this single change outweighs every supplement in this article combined.

Uncontrolled blood sugar. Chronically high glucose stiffens and narrows small blood vessels, blunts the bacteria-killing power of neutrophils, damages the sensory nerves that report injuries, and glycates structural proteins, collagen included. This is why diabetic foot ulcers are a leading cause of amputation — and why glucose control is legitimately a wound treatment. If you have diabetes or suspect prediabetes, healing trouble is one more reason to take it seriously: see the diabetes article.

Corticosteroids. Systemic steroids (prednisone and relatives, used long-term) suppress the inflammatory phase — and since inflammation is a required construction step, healing slows and skin thins. Never stop a prescribed steroid on your own; do make sure anyone treating a slow wound knows you take one. (Vitamin A has some evidence of partially counteracting steroid-impaired healing and is occasionally used for that purpose — a decision for your doctor, not a DIY project, since it interacts with the reason you're on steroids.)

NSAIDs — the nuanced one. Occasional ibuprofen or naproxen for a few days is unlikely to matter for a minor wound. The concerns are at the margins: prolonged, high-dose use may blunt the early inflammatory signals, and there's ongoing debate — mostly from animal and orthopedic data — about NSAIDs impairing bone and tendon healing, which is why some surgeons restrict them after fractures and tendon repairs. Follow your surgeon's specific guidance; for everyday cuts and scrapes, short-course use is not worth anxiety.

Poor sleep and chronic stress. Growth hormone pulses, immune housekeeping, and tissue repair are disproportionately night-shift operations, and experimental studies show measurably slower skin-barrier and wound recovery under sleep deprivation and high stress. Boring advice, real mechanism: a healing body earns its seven to nine hours.

Also on the list: heavy alcohol use (immune suppression, malnutrition), protein-calorie malnutrition (see above), infection itself, swelling that isn't controlled (elevate!), repeated trauma to the site, and obesity's effect on wound tension and blood supply. Each is a lever; smoking and glucose are the biggest two.

Back to Table of Contents

Scars

Once the skin has closed, attention turns to what the mark will look like in a year. Scar care has its own folklore; here is the evidence-ranked version.

Silicone sheeting and gels — the evidence-backed option. Self-adhesive silicone sheets (or silicone gel that dries to a film), worn over the closed scar many hours a day for two to three months, are the most-studied non-prescription scar treatment and the standard first recommendation for preventing and flattening raised (hypertrophic and keloid) scars. Honesty requires the footnote: the Cochrane review of silicone sheeting found the supporting trials to be of low quality and prone to bias — so the effect is probably real but less certain than the product boxes imply. Silicone works best started early (once the wound is fully closed), on people prone to raised scars, and worn consistently. It's cheap, painless, and low-risk, which is why it stays first-line despite the imperfect trials.

Scar massage. Firm massage of a healed scar for a few minutes daily is widely recommended by hand therapists and burn units to soften and flatten scars and reduce tightness. Formal evidence is limited and mostly from burn care, but it costs nothing, feels reasonable, and helps desensitize scars that are oddly tender. Wait until the wound is fully closed and cleared for it.

Sun protection — the one nobody does. New scars are missing pigment protection and hyperpigment easily; a scar that tans can stay permanently darker than the surrounding skin. Keep a fresh scar out of the sun or under SPF 30+ (or covered) for at least the first 6 to 12 months. This is the cheapest cosmetic intervention on this page.

What doesn't earn its reputation: vitamin E oil, the classic recommendation, has failed to outperform plain moisturizer in trials and causes contact dermatitis in a meaningful minority of users — skip it. Onion-extract gels (Mederma and similar) have mixed results, generally not beating simple petrolatum in comparative studies. Cocoa butter and similar moisturizers are pleasant and harmless but not scar-specific. For scars that are already raised, thick, or growing (keloids), a dermatologist has genuinely effective tools — steroid injections, laser, cryotherapy — and earlier is easier.

Back to Table of Contents

Research Papers and References

Every reference below was verified against its DOI record. Reviews are favored over single small trials, and the Cochrane reviews are the ones to read first if you want the unvarnished evidence.

  1. Wilkinson HN, Hardman MJ. Wound healing: cellular mechanisms and pathological outcomes. Open Biology. 2020;10(9):200223. doi:10.1098/rsob.200223
  2. Eming SA, Martin P, Tomic-Canic M. Wound repair and regeneration: mechanisms, signaling, and translation. Science Translational Medicine. 2014;6(265):265sr6. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3009337
  3. Guo S, DiPietro LA. Factors affecting wound healing. Journal of Dental Research. 2010;89(3):219–229. doi:10.1177/0022034509359125
  4. Molnar JA, Underdown MJ, Clark WA. Nutrition and chronic wounds. Advances in Wound Care. 2014;3(11):663–681. doi:10.1089/wound.2014.0530
  5. Lin PH, Sermersheim M, Li H, et al. Zinc in wound healing modulation. Nutrients. 2017;10(1):16. doi:10.3390/nu10010016
  6. Jull AB, Cullum N, Dumville JC, et al. Honey as a topical treatment for wounds. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2015;(3):CD005083. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD005083.pub4
  7. Storm-Versloot MN, Vos CG, Ubbink DT, Vermeulen H. Topical silver for preventing wound infection. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2010;(3):CD006478. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD006478.pub2
  8. Dat AD, Poon F, Pham KB, Doust J. Aloe vera for treating acute and chronic wounds. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2012;(2):CD008762. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD008762.pub2
  9. Maenthaisong R, Chaiyakunapruk N, Niruntraporn S, Kongkaew C. The efficacy of aloe vera used for burn wound healing: a systematic review. Burns. 2007;33(6):713–718. doi:10.1016/j.burns.2006.10.384
  10. Bylka W, Znajdek-Awiżeń P, Studzińska-Sroka E, Dąbrowska M, Brzezińska M. Centella asiatica in dermatology: an overview. Phytotherapy Research. 2014;28(8):1117–1124. doi:10.1002/ptr.5110
  11. Sørensen LT. Wound healing and infection in surgery: the clinical impact of smoking and smoking cessation — a systematic review and meta-analysis. Archives of Surgery. 2012;147(4):373–383. doi:10.1001/archsurg.2012.5
  12. O'Brien L, Jones DJ. Silicone gel sheeting for preventing and treating hypertrophic and keloid scars. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2013;(9):CD003826. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD003826.pub3

Ongoing research: wound healing and nutrition · honey wound dressings · silicone scar therapy on PubMed.

Connections

Back to Table of Contents