Treatment
Skin ulcers may take a very long time to heal. Treatment is typically to avoid the ulcer getting infected, remove any excess discharge, maintain a moist wound environment, control the edema, and ease pain caused by nerve and tissue damage.
Topical antibiotics are normally used to prevent the ulcer getting infected, and the wound or ulcer is usually kept clear of dead tissue through surgical debridement.
Commonly, as a part of the treatment, patients are advised to change their lifestyle if possible and to change their diet. Improving the circulation is important in treating skin ulcers, and patients are consequently usually recommended to exercise, stop smoking, and lose weight.
In recent years, advances have been made in accelerating healing of chronic wounds and ulcers. Chronic wounds produce fewer growth hormones than necessary for healing tissue, and healing may be accelerated by replacing or stimulating growth factors while controlling the formation of other substances that work against them.
Leg ulcers can be prevented by using compression stockings to prevent blood pooling and back flow. It is likely that a person who has had a skin ulcer will have it again; use of compression stockings every day for at least 5 years after the skin ulcer has healed may help to prevent recurrence.
Read more about this topic: Ulcer (dermatology)
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Judge Ginsburg’s selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, “Honey—the White House is on the phone.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“If the study of all these sciences, which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)