Should you blindly trust your doctor?

When I went to my doctor 2 weeks ago, I told him what I was doing. I scrub every night with a sodium chloride solution, letit dry for a little while, put on some neosporion and bandage it back up until the next night when I do it again. Despite the infection that had set in in the surrounding tissue, he said it looked great and that I was doing everything just right. "Keep doing what you're doing, take the antibioticsa and come back in two weeks so I can make sure everything is healing properly." So I have an appointment for Monday. I got the information on how to take care of the wounds from the nurse at the doctor's office, the pharmacist (on what to use to clean it) and my knowledge of basic treatment so I can't blame it all on the doctor but I have been doing exactly as I had been since it was "perfect".

Adam told all his coworkers about my accident and a woman from Boise called him on Friday and talked to him. 6 months ago, she fell off of a ladder and cracked her leg open to the bone. They told her to do pretty much what I've been doing and she was doing it. It got infected so they put her on antibiotics but told her to keep doing what she was doing. And she did, for a while. But the infection got so bad, the doctor started talking about the need for amputation. So she found a wound specialist (I have never heard of sucha thing) and told him what she had been doing to take care of it. He said that basically, it was he wrong thing to be doing. He told her what she needed to do. She's still wounded but it's no longer infected. So Adam came home and talked to me about it and told me I should do some online research about how to treat road rash.

I looked a number of sites and they all agreed that letting it scab over is outdated...that's one of the worst things to do because it results in scarring and it takes longer to heal and it's what causes all the itching during healing. Also, they all agreed that scrubbing is also outdated as it aggrivates the wound and does more damage and it takes longer to heal.

So what AM I suposed to do?

Treat it more like burn than a scratch. Initially, you have to do as much scrubbing as it takes to get the road grit and everything else out of it but that should be the only hard scrubbing you ever do on it.

So here is what should have been doing all along and I would be healed by now:
1. Clean wound with a Sodium Chloride solution (yeah me) lightly removing, with a guaze pad, the tissue trying to form a scab (exudites I think they're called).
2. Blot dry with surgical guaze sponges.
3. Apply Carrasyn V gel or Silver Sulfadiazine (both are burn creams).
4. Cover with burn treatment pads (2nd Skin, Tegaderm and Bioclusive are the ones named and 2nd Skin was rated the best)
5. Hold in place with some conforming guaze roll.
6. Use surgilast to hold it all in place.

The wounds need to be cleaned daily. Followig this from the beginning, most road rash heals in 10 days, more severe rash can take 2-3 weeks to heal...with minimum scarring.

I trust doctors pretty well. But I really need to take a more active part in my own medical care...get myself informed and make sure I'm doing the best thing for my body.


Oh,oh, oh...one more thing. I learned a handy tip from the best site I found. Leave your bandagig on and wrap the site with saran wrap and take a quick shower. Dry off, then remove the sarn wrap. I can take a shower again!!!! :o)