Why does salt and alcohol hurt open wounds?
In: Biology
When you have an open wound, you have exposed nerve endings. The signals that nerve ending send are chemical in nature. So when you introduce a high concentration of sodium ions (in the case of salt) you cause those nerve endings to misfire and send a signal of pain when there salt itself is not causing much damage at all. For alcohol it’s the Ethanol that causes pain because we have little nodes called vanilloid receptors that detect heat so we dont burn ourselves. The Ethanol activates the vanilloid receptor and sends a misfired message to the brain that you’re experiencing pain.
And lemon juice too. Everything in a tequila shooter hurts wounds. But also makes them feel better! TIL
In the case of alcohol, it lowers the temperature needed to make the nerves that feel burning work.
In the case of salt, nerves fire by swapping sodium and potassium ions, and a salt imbalance causes them to go haywire a bit. Additionally, if you actually rub salt into a wound, you may be abrading it.
Additionally, salt and alcohol will desiccate (draw out water) from tissues and kill them. Lemon juice (as another comment mentioned) has a pH of 2-3 and will basically acid burn a wound.
The dead, oil-infused skin cells of the epidermis do a lot to keep nasty stuff from ever reaching living, hydrated tissue.
Latest Answers