eli5: How do dissolving sutures work?
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Dissolvable/absorbable suture material is made out of inert protein strands that your body can easily break down in a couple of weeks, after the wound has gained enough strength through natural healing.
Your body has cool cells called macrophages. These macrophages are like the vaccum cleaners of the bodies immune system and just eat and break down anything that’s not healthy body tissue (in usual operation. Ofcourse there are diseases where they damage healthy tissues). The things they eat include damaged cells, and pathogen invaders. Dissolvable sutures are technically dissolvable in the sense that you can put them in a solvent like water and they disappear. Instead they are made of proteins that are unreactive (won’t cause damage/changes to the tissue they are applied too). Now these protein sutures help hold the skin and underlying tissue together, while the body actually mends the gap with blood clotting and fibrous tissue production etc. now after the wound is all healed, those macrophages I mentioned earlier, come in and clean up all the leftovers of the healing process (ie the trainee electrician who comes and sweeps up all the wire cuttings off the floor after the electrician finishes fixing something), and in doing so, they detect these protein sutures which aren’t from the human body, and thus they start eating them and breaking them down, and eventually the stitches disappear and only a scar remains (the scar comes from that fibrous tissue I mentioned earlier)
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