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Science

Electric Wound Dressing Could Help Injuries Heal Faster (newscientist.com) 29

An electric wound dressing can help heal injuries faster than existing methods, according to tests in rats. From a report: Previous research has found that applying electric fields across a cut can speed up wound healing, but this usually requires large and specialised equipment. Because of this, Guang Yao at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and his colleagues wanted to develop an alternative that could be applied in a similar way to traditional wound dressings. "Non-invasive, efficient, cost-effective and convenient approaches are always desired for treating skin wounds," he says. The dressing is made up of four layers. The bottom layer is made from an electrically charged plastic that produces an electric field through static contact with the skin. Next is a layer of flexible silicone rubber gel that moulds to the skin's curvature, and then a layer of shape memory alloy that pushes the two sides of the wound together. A second layer of flexible gel completes the dressing, which is just 0.2 millimetres thick in total. The team tested the wound-healing properties of the dressing on around 50 rats. They anaesthetised the rats before giving each either a 1-centimetre-long linear wound or a 0.8-centimetre-diameter circular wound and then either applying the new dressing, applying a standard dressing or leaving them to heal by themselves.
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Electric Wound Dressing Could Help Injuries Heal Faster

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  • "in rats"

  • by olddoc ( 152678 ) on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:00AM (#62223697)
    The story linked to this research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]. It's from 2003. I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been more development and research in this field. There may be other benefits besides simply speed. The sooner a wound is closed the sooner the risk of infection goes down. If electric fields influence cells to migrate in to the wound it is possible it would encourage white blood cells to move in and increase the body's defense against infection.
  • Completion of TFS (Score:3, Informative)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:11AM (#62223729) Journal
    To keep this from being clickbait you need the outcome.

    "The circular wounds that received the electric dressing were 96.8 per cent closed after eight days, compared with between 76.4 and 79.9 per cent closed with other dressings, and 45.9 per cent closed for wounds that weren’t dressed. The straight wounds healed faster than round ones because they have less “defect tissue”, says Yao, but the relative performance was similar."
  • Dr. Becker demonstrated this in the 1980's. Bone regrowth. Healing old fractures. Stem cell generation. Even regrew a miniature rat's paw with tendons, nerves everything. Just using silver electrodes and very low voltage&current.

    Then he found an electric basis for acupuncture, and immediately had his funding cut. typical.

    Anyway, read his book "The Body Electric". and his other books if you get hooked.

    • Pffft. Becker also believed in low frequency EM could cause ESP. His work has been solidly debunked by many studies, a couple mentioned in wikipedia.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      This is nothing more than magnets on bands and 18th century "electric healing", all bullshit.

      • by danda ( 11343 )

        Believe as you wish. Yet this chinese study appears to get similar results as Becker... showing that electricity, properly applied, can stimulate healing/regeneration.

  • ...this sounds more complicated than just a car battery and some jumper cables.

  • But you can't patent that, not putting a plastic bag over the wound and adding some oxigen to the bag.
    BigPharma is still investigating whether they can patent the bag.

  • I wonder if they've tried red light treatment to see if that is an cumulative effect?

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