Understanding the Different Types of Burns

Each year in the United States, around 2 million people are injured by burns and a half-million Americans seek emergency care after a burn. From lying out in the sun too long to scalding yourself when a pot of boiling water spills, burns happen frequently.

Aside from burn threats lurking around almost every corner, burns can also be notoriously tricky to heal, especially if they’re moderate to severe. 

In this blog post, Dr. Leon Tio and the team at Clover Oxygen Hyperbarics and Wound Center dive into the challenging world of burn care. More specifically, we take a look at the different degrees of burns, why some burns heal slowly, and how a boost in oxygen can help.

The three degrees of burns

The medical world has long divided burns into three types:

First-degree burns

This type describes superficial burns that don’t break the top layer of your skin — your epidermis. Instead, you may develop soreness or redness, such as when you get a mild sunburn.

Second-degree burns

With second-degree burns, the damage reaches down into the middle layers of your skin, involving both your epidermis and your dermis. While the injury doesn’t break the skin, second-degree burns often lead to painful blistering.

Third-degree burns

This is the most severe type of burn, as it gets past your skin and reaches the layer of fat beneath, essentially gaining access to your body. These burns lead to a good deal of damage, and they can wreak havoc on your sweat glands, hair follicles, nerves, and blood vessels.

Why burn healing is challenging

When we say that burns are tough to heal, we’re mainly referring to second- and third-degree burns, and mostly third-degree burns at that.

As we mentioned, third-degree burns destroy your protective skin layers and reach deeper into your body. While this is challenging enough, the real problem lies in the fact that your third-degree burn can destroy the blood vessels in the area.

When you’re wounded, your body jumps into action and sets off a wound healing cascade that relies on your blood to deliver the necessary resources for repairing and regenerating new cells. If the blood vessels are temporarily out of order, your burn isn’t getting these resources, which is a major healing hurdle.

Your damaged blood vessels can also leak fluids, which leads to swelling (edema) around the burn.

As a result of these complications, people with third-degree burns are at a much higher risk for infection — the more time it takes for your body to heal, the more time bacteria have to invade.

Boosting healing with hyperbaric oxygen therapy

If your body is struggling to deliver the resources your burn needs, we can make up the difference through hyperbaric oxygen therapy. With this treatment, we place you in a pressurized chamber that pushes 100% oxygen into your body.

This boost in oxygen can help your body create the cells it needs to heal, such as white blood cells and tissue cells. As well, oxygen can prevent edema by constricting your blood vessels, and it can help to keep infection at bay.

It’s important to see us quickly for burn care — early hyperbaric oxygen treatments have been shown to speed recovery and improve outcomes.

If you have more questions about the role that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can play in helping your burn to heal, please don’t hesitate to contact Clover Oxygen Hyperbarics and Wound Center in Aledo, Texas.