An Old-Fashioned Wound Healing Treatment Resurrection: The Sugar Treatment Revival

Whenever you or someone you love happens to get a cut, scrape, or burn you probably head straight to the medicine cabinet in search of some type of antiseptic or antibiotic ointment, with some bandages, to help make everything all better. While many modern day concentrations of lotions, potions, and cremes are one accepted way of healing an injury, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that there is another, just as effective, treatment solution that can be found, inexpensively, right in the baking aisle of your nearest neighborhood grocery store.

At this point, you're probably wondering what in the world this person could possibly be referring to? A cheaper solution for healing wounds that can be found in the baking section? You may be thinking that I must be going over the edge a little bit here. It is totally understandable that you might come to that conclusion. However, I'm completely serious about this, and the aforementioned solution that I am referring to is simple table sugar! Yes, I'm talking about regular, white granulated sugar that you use in the kitchen to sweeten food with, or to put in your coffee to make it taste sweeter.

Sugar is truly an excellent antibacterial medium. Sugar has reportedly been used since our ancestor's days to help aid the healing of wounds. As a matter of fact, some records indicate that sugar has been effectively used for its antibacterial properties for at least 5,000 years!

With ever-increasing antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria being found more often, this is starting to become quite a major problem. However, what's uniquely different about sugar is that it contains properties that bacteria are simply not resistant to. Although sugar works great as an antibacterial agent on minor cuts and scrapes, it is also highly effective at healing much deeper ,or seriously infected, wounds such as ulcers, punctures, and amputations. Sugar also has been shown to work wonders at healing burns and abscesses, even those that are quite severe.

Simply put, basic and inexpensive table sugar works so well that it can, in some cases, even help save someone's life! For example, there was one particular case where a patient was very close to having a limb amputated in order to help save their life, but doctors were able to help save that limb, and the patient's life, by simply treating the wound with a simple sugar dressing! One additional benefit of sugar is that it works in a number of ways to help heal a wound extremely quick, while also leaving very little to no skin scarring.

Sugar acts as an osmotic shock treatment by drawing, absorbing and drying out the wound, as well as inhibiting bacterial invasion while gently stimulating new tissue growth. You can use granulated sugar alone, or mixed with povidone iodine (pronounced POE-vi-done EYE-oh-dyne), which you can find at any local pharmacy chain like 'Walgreens', to form a spreadable paste. You may also store any unused portion of the mixture in a tightly sealed container to reuse later.

As with any type of traumatic wound, clean and flush the cavity with clean water and peroxide and apply compression until the injury stops bleeding. Packing a wound to soon with sugar could cause the wound to bleed excessively.

To help keep the wound continually protected against infection, check the packing and dressing frequently. When the sugar pack becomes syrupy or liquefied, flush out the old fluids and dead tissue matter with clean water, repack with sugar and apply bandages.

Next time you or a loved one has an injury, you may want to consider reaching for your sugar bowl rather than for a tube of antibiotic ointment. Give it a try sometime, and you might be simply amazed by how quickly the wound begins to heal!