Why are burns due to chemicals or intense cold also called “burns”? What do they have in common with the regular burns due to fire or heat?

Question

Not sure whether to flair this as biology or physics, but any idea why?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Referring to these as “burns” is mostly a matter of convenience. In the hospital injuries to the skin from heat or cold are referred to as “thermal injuries”. There’s also electrical injuries and chemical and so on. However it’s the same group of people in the hospital that deal with all these types of injuries and it’s usually the burn unit or plastic surgery teams. Because of this people often just call everything a burn of one type or another. In reality it’s more about the fact that it’s all injuries to the skin.
When you work on those units there’s technical terms that are used to be clear about what type of injury and how bad. So they might say it’s a superficial partial thickness scald to 4% total body surface area. But in layman’s terms they mean the person was has a second degree burn from hot water to part of their arm and hand.