How About Some "Skin Sealer" For Medical Use? for medical use

[Vicious_AD 0]

I've gotten this idea from a spiderman comic:Suppose we made an apparatus that sealed flesh in the same way bags ate sealed with those little sealite thingies (they look like staplers, but you close them on the bag, they hear up, and you run them across the bag, melting the plastic together). We could have it excrete a substance that temporarily melted to skin like glue, and was soliable to a certain chemical like alcohol so that it could be removed for surgery. These would only be used for emergency care to prevent bleeding to death, and maybe on the battlefield. Good idea?

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

Did you know - that minor wounds and even deep gashes can be temporarily sealed up if you have some superglue handy ? Yep - it's true!! Superglue's a really effective way of immediately stopping bleeding. Works even better that bandaid strips. All you need to do it let it drip into your wound and harden

[kgd2006 0]

Wow...using super glue to heal open tear wounds? Cant those chemicals use to make super glue harm you in some unhealthy way? Especially when your putting it right on your blood and maybe eventually into your blood stream. What a very interesting method to stop blood, next time when someone I see have a open wound I hope people dont look at me stupid when I say "PUT SOME SUPERGLUE ON IT!!!" =P

[finaldesign1405241487 0]

Isn't that superglue TOXIC?

[illini319 0]

Surgical glue, in many forms, are being developed tested and used at present. Some of them are a concoction of resynthesized biopolymers; some are seaweed/algal based. Some of them have drugs imbedded in their matrix, i.e. antibiotics. The greatest risks in surgery come from its inherent invasiveness; that is that you actually have to cut to fix. Improving this technology will certainly be useful and life-saving.

[Houdini 0]

Actually there is an even better cut healer than super glue and I have used it many times. I am an electrician by trade and cuts are something quite common just from doing your job. Sometime we are required to run conduit that is PVC and we use PVC glue. It was found by accident that PVC glue spilled onto an open wound will close it and stop bleeding immediately. The neat part about PVC glue is that if you leave it on the affected area a day or two you just rub the PVC glue off and there is a normal scab under it. Of cource electricains and plumbers always have PVC glue handy and it cought on amoung a lot of the other trades. Most preferred it over band aids since the glue will flex with the skin and with knuckle knee or any joint bandages don't work too well but PVC glue does. Never seen any side effects from it (unless you inhale the fumes) except intoxication which is not from putiing the glue on the wound but from sniffing the glue itself.

Edited April 28, 2006 by Houdini (see edit history)

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

Superglue and the alikes are all cyano-acrylate compounds - the chemical name suggests these might be extremely harmful if soaked into your bloodstream.. But I believe that for some reason, the molecular bonds formed in the end products render them harmless.

 

Superglue, infact is very common wound reparation medium among athletes. A piece of sticky-stretchy bandaid might not feel very comfortable while running/jumping.. plus it takes a while to stop the bleeding. Superglue on the other hands is totally unobtrusive and seals the wound in a matter of seconds.

 

Guess where I learnt this one.. Anyone watch the TV Series - MONK - the detective series involving the character Adrian Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub ? This was there in one of the episodes.. and then later on it got me interested and I looked up on the net and found it to be true.

 

I'd gathered some snippets from the net longtime back - here they are:

Superglue was used by trauma surgeons in Vietnam to glue the edges

of lacerated livers together (ever try to SEW liver?). Works great.

It also works perfectly fine in normal skin wounds, and is non-toxic.

The only reason it hasn't been approved by the FDA for this purpose is

that the studies would cost millions, and who's going to pay them?

Superglue has long since passed off-patent.

 

I work occasionally at a private research lab which does

experimental surgical research on animals. In dogs, we had a lot of

problem with oozing and infection at sites where arterial catheters

were left in. Now we superglue them and all that problem is gone. The

glue doesn't interfere with healing, and it seals excellently. It is

as resistent to abscessing as staples, and seals far better. For

wounds in animals which have been anticoagulated, it's a godsend.

Survival animals which have catheters pulled later suffer no ill

effects, and the wounds heal fine.

 

Weil has many areas where he's out to lunch, but superglue isn't one

of them.

 

Steve Harris, M.D.

 

More.......

 

Super-glue (cyanoacrylate) is also used extensively by plastic surgeons

to close facial lacerations in order to avoid suture scars.

 

Source: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

[Sarah81 0]

There's a surgical adhesive that replaces sutures and staples. I heard a while back (a couple of years ago or something like that) that this could become a common option for surgery on humans. I don't know if this is actually being used on people yet, but I know that we're giving it a try with animals.My brother's female cat came back from the vet a couple of weeks ago with adhesive instead of dissolving sutures over her incision (bro. had her spayed). As did my Mom's cat, who went in that same day.Unfortunately, the adhesive didn't work very well. Both cats had to go back in last week and have staples put in becaue the incisions opened up again.My thinking is that if you do that with a human, you can tell that person to sit still and not run around or do any other crazy things that will cause the site to re-open. But try getting a very active kitten to listen to that!

[littleweseth1405241521 0]

There's an article on Snopes.com that deals with using cyanoacrylate adhesives (superglue, krazy glue) to seal wounds. Cyanoacrylates were originally developed by Eastman Kodak to use for gunsight crosshairs, I presume the 'cross' in a sniper scope or similar. Anyway, they turned out useless for that, but during Vietnam one guy pulled out the formula and developed it into a spray-on wound sealant.

Source : http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2187/was-super-glue-invented-to-seal-battle-wounds-in-vietnam

Also I heard stories about people with fingers and stuff chopped off using superglue to keep them on until they could get back to a medic. So there ya go

'Cyanoacrylate' does sound nasty, and when it cures it releases some mildly unpleasant things (fomaldehyde and some other stuff) that cause skin irritation, but new stuff has been developed that lacks the side-products during curing, probably the same stuff the vets used on Sarah81's cats.

Edited April 30, 2006 by littleweseth (see edit history)

[Elmbonsai 0]

First let me say, DO NOT PUT PVC GLUE ON YOUR SKIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Tha stuff is terrible, I used that stuff for years and it has alcohols in it that allow it to soak right into your skin making it more toxic than super glue, low VOC my you know what.The super glue that EMT's use isn't the stuff we buy, it's some special mix.Hey, I like your idea, why not do something like that food saver dealy though. You could place a bag over the entire area and suck all the air out this way there would be even pressure on the entire cut and no bacteria could live there, except botulism.In reality though 3M has a product already that is silicone based and you paint it on like liquid bandage. It doen't have the nasty super glue. the 3M stuff dries really fast and it hardly smells.I once put it on a snack that had just been bitten by another snake and the snake didn't mind it at all; they have very sensitive mucus membranes.3M also makes these really cool bandages that once put on (and allowed to set), they don't come off for like three days, if you try to get it to come off earlier you have to pick at it forever and then you have left over glue that will stick around for days if you don't scrub it off, you don't get the glue residue on when they are allowed to come off by themselves. The cool thing is that these are waterproof on both sides, so nothing gets in and nothing comes out.

[iGuest 3]

Actually, there's a product called Liquid Skin that you can buy over-the-counter in US drugstores (and I notice that there are generic knock-offs as well).  I'm trying it out on a long razor cut on my palm (difficult wound to get closed).

It burns like hell, and takes a lot longer than superglue to bond -- I can't bond the wound shut, but I can seal it.  They give you a brush to apply it (something like a nail polish brush), but I find it's better if you put it on very thin and pat it down with a paper towel -- a thinner layer that dries quicker than just glopping it on.

 Stuff seems to contain a lot of the same ingredients as superglue, and sure smells like it.

 So this seems like a good alternative to using commercial glues -- obviously it's been developed for medical use.  Prob. Not as strong as anything they might use in triage or the EM, but definitely good for minor first aid of wounds that are difficult to bandage or seal...

[iGuest 3]

I don't know about PVC cement, but that "Liquid Skin" they've come out with stings beyond belief when you put it on the wound/cut. I have some and I've used it on very small cuts, but I don't think I could take putting it on anything even the size of a penny, much less larger. It's a stinging way beyond alcohol or anything else I've had to deal with.

I suspect PVC cement is probably just as bad, but if plumbers have been using that stuff with good results, that's fine with me. I'm gotten it on normal skin and it does form a nice barrier that sure isn't likely to fall off very quickly.