How Cuts Heal Themselves🩹

Morning healers!

Here's a fun fact for ya:

The skin is AWESOME!

It's our body's biggest organ, it constantly renews itself every 28 days and… if it gets damaged, It can literally HEAL itself…

Woah, how does it do that?

Good question.

Let's say you cut your arm…

Maybe you slipped while cutting vegetables, who knows.

The first stage of the skin’s “magic healing process” is to try solve these 2 big problems:

1: The skin has been punctured (meaning nasty outside things can come in).

2: Blood is leaking out of said puncture (which is also really bad).

The body starts by narrowing the blood vessels around the cut to slow the flow of blood and minimize bleeding.

Then there's these little things in your blood called platelets and some protein dudes called fibrin that all RUSH to the hole and clump up together with the blood, forming… A blood clot!

That's the first 2 major issues out of the way.

But after about 3 hours, the skin starts turning red, signaling the next stage 2...

Inflammation.

Now that the bleeding is under control little white blood cells are sent to fight any nasty pathogens or bacteria that may have gotten through the cut while it was open.

However, cause these white blood cell dudes need to travel through the blood to get to the wound site, the previously narrowed blood vessels now expand in a process called vasodilation.

And because the blood vessels are now thicker, there's more blood.

And because there's more blood, the skin looks all red!

Ahhhhh, makes sense.

About two to three days later stage 3 begins, called “the proliferative stage”.

Imagine this part of the process as the “rebuilding” stage.

Little cells called fibroblasts kinda act like mini construction workers and produce a substance called collagen, a strong material used to help build new tissue.

There's also this other tissue called granulation tissue that temporarily fills in the wound and provides a framework for new tissue growth, kinda like scaffolding that holds a structure together.