Modern Wet Healing Theory

The wounds and injuries of early man were the result of accident and struggle. Before the 18th century, people used natural items such as tea, feathers, leaves and soil as wound dressings to relieve wound pain and promote wound healing, which is the bud of wound care.

At the end of the 18th century, Professor Louis Pasteur pioneered the concept of sterility and bacterial infection control, which led to new breakthroughs in wound care concepts such as how to avoid wound infection.

In 1867, Joseph Lister drew on the related theories of Louis Pasteur and introduced the concept of aseptic surgery to the care of surgical incisions and related wounds. He invented the cotton gauze dressing to protect the wound from the invasion of bacteria in the air. In the following 100 years, materials with "dry and breathable" as the main nursing principles continued to appear. So far, the "dry healing" theory represented by cotton gauze products has become the mainstream of wound healing.

Advantages of dry healing: Pioneered wound care theory to protect wounds and reduce bacterial invasion.

Disadvantages of dry healing: scabs, pain, secondary injury, wound adhesion, scar hyperplasia, muscle contracture and other phenomena.

With the continuous development of wound care theory, new materials, new technologies and new ideas are constantly emerging.

  • In 1958, Odland first discovered that wounds with intact blisters heal faster than those with ruptured blisters

  • In 1962, Dr. Winter confirmed in his experiments that the wound heals twice as fast in a wet environment than in a dry environment, changing the traditional concept of keeping the wound dry and breathable, and advocating that the wound care should keep the wound moist and free of air. Bacterial environment, opened the precedent for the concept of wet care, and made the rapid development of biomaterials in the field of wound care

  •In 1963, Dr. Hinman applied "wet therapy" to the human body for the first time, so that "a moist and closed environment can promote the formation of epithelium and accelerate wound healing" has been the most powerful proof. As a result, new wound care theories and dressings have emerged, namely, the theory of moist healing and occlusive moist dressings.

People have begun to develop various new types of dressings, hoping that this dressing can not only absorb wound exudate to obtain adequate drainage, but also retain all or part of the exudate in the covering to maintain a moist environment.

The concept of "wet wound healing" gradually became widely accepted in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the first generation of moisturizing hydrocolloid dressings was born. In the 1990s, with the development of material technology, a variety of dressings with different functions were produced to adapt to the characteristics of different stages of wound healing.

Wet healing, the standard therapy for wound care. In August 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) specifically emphasized in the newly issued "Guidelines for the Wound Medical Products Industry" that maintaining a moist environment on the wound surface is the standard wound treatment method.

The wound moist environment refers to the microenvironment that is conducive to wound healing created by the moderate moisturizing of the wound, such as slightly acid environment, anaerobic or hypoxic environment, autolytic debridement environment, growth factor release environment, etc. The healing environment is typically characterized by no scabbing, minimal invasiveness and less pain.

Wet Healing Benefits:

The wound is moistened locally, which is conducive to the dissolution of necrotic tissue and fibrin without the formation of scabs.

The airtight dressing creates a healing environment close to the physiological state, the local temperature is close to body temperature, the speed of cell division and proliferation is fast, and the growth of granulation tissue is promoted.

Relieve pain, the dressing does not adhere to the new granulation tissue of the wound, and there is no re-injury when changing the dressing

The occlusive dressing reduces the chance of infection.

The wet healing theory has gone through more than half a century, and it represents people's continuous pursuit of the concept of trauma care and the continuous improvement of humanistic care for patients. It has raised the requirement of wound healing from the simple "prevention of infection" to a more caring and humane level of "preventing scars, promoting healing, and reducing pain and comfort".