Actuality check out: Flour is an ineffective and likely damaging therapy for burns

In excess of 180,000 social media end users are sharing posts saying flour can be used to decrease suffering and avoid purple marks and blistering from burns. This assert is fake – a number of burn up experts instructed Reuters that flour is not encouraged as a remedy for burns.

The posts (  below  ,  below  ) say, “[…] my hand went into the boiling water…!! […] I put my hand in the bag of flour for 10 minutes, pulled it out and did not even have a pink mark or a blister & completely NO Soreness. […] Keep a bag of flour in your fridge and you will be delighted you did! Flour has heat absorbent property and also has a solid antioxidant residence, as a result it can help in burn people if used in 15 minutes.”

Posts with practically exactly the exact same textual content have been circulating due to the fact at the very least 2011 (below).

Dr Justin Gillenwater, Medical Director at the Burn off Center at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center (dhs.lacounty.gov/lacusc/) told Reuters via electronic mail that “Flour really should absolutely not be applied to any burn off wound at any time. Flour will NOT assist cool the burn off and may well guide to an greater threat of an infection.” He extra that “the flour may perhaps be painful and complicated to cleanse off the melt away web site and may possibly make diagnosis of the sizing and depth of the burn up complicated.” 

Dr Sam Mandell, a melt away care professional at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and an affiliate professor of operation at the College of Washington School of Medicine (here), also told Reuters via email that the flour could be agonizing to cleanse off wounds and that there is no proof to help flour as a cure for burns. He added that “when disbursed as great dust, flour is flammable and should be kept away from ignition resources.”

Jeffrey W. Shupp, MD, FACS, director of the Burn Middle at MedStar Washington Healthcare facility Middle in Washington, D.C. (here) told Reuters via email that adding flour is not suggested as it may make it harder to recover the wound: “It obscures the wound bed [making] it difficult to evaluate the injury. It also could accelerate the proliferation of bacteria escalating the chances for wound an infection.”

Henry Schiller, MD, a surgeon specialising in burns from the non-gain educational medical centre, the Mayo Clinic (below), agreed that flour would make the task of professional medical professionals dealing with the burn up much more difficult and should therefore not be set on burns. He told Reuters by means of e mail that the “flour would want to be cleansed off a burn as it would interfere with the capacity to utilize temporary skin substitutes, which may perhaps be necessary to assistance recover superficial wounds.”

The Environment Wellbeing Organisation and the Mayo Clinic advise that burns must be addressed with cool running water to reduce the temperature of the burn and that rings and other restricted items ought to be eliminated promptly just before inflammation. They say that much more intense burns might need urgent clinical treatment (  here  ,  below  ).

VERDICT

Untrue. A number of burn up experts confirmed that flour should not be utilized to treat burns as it will not assistance cool the burn up and could lead to added discomfort, lead to an improved chance of infection and make it a lot more difficult for a medical specialist to evaluate and deal with the wound.

This post was made by the Reuters Point Verify team. Study far more about our reality-checking work  here  .