When I was a teen I was playing basketball and collided heads with someone. It cut my eyebrow open maybe 1/2 inch. I was okay besides some bleeding. But people were telling me I should go get it stitched.
Ball was life, so I kept playing and now its fine I even have a cool scar. I have even heard other people over the years show me scars and say stuff like “I probably should have got stitches but whatever” and most of their scars looked fine besides the fact they were scars.
So why get stitches unless its an obviously huge cut that wont close by its self?
In: Biology
Even though many times you’d be fine without them, there’s a small but significant chance that a cut like that can become infected and very dangerous to your health. Stitches substantially reduce infection and re-opening risk, speed up healing, and can reduce scarring if you care about that sort of thing.
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Sewing it up helps it to stop bleeding, it makes it heal faster, it makes it look better when healed (smaller scar)
While it could, having a cut closed both helps keep it clean, prevents infection (see keeping it clean) and can help it heal
Correctly..
I got a cut in my hand, needed stiches but becuase it was a clean cut from glass, they were able to glue it back together and there’s barely a scar.
Compared to one that needed stitches but got nothing, has left a visible and noticeable mark/bump.
So, first of all, a lot of people don’t want scars— especially facial scars. They’re part of a few very distinctive *looks* that, uh, aren’t what everybody’s going for.
If you let a deep cut heal naturally, there’s a risk it’ll heal… funny. The two sides won’t necessarily line up just right, and maybe your skin will twist or crease. And maybe that’ll be fine— just another layer of cool scar, even— but it could be too-tight in one direction, or hurt when you turn your arm just so. Why take the risk, when a few stitches can hold everything in place until it heals right?
A stitched wound heals *faster.* You can get back to not-having-an-open-wound in, say, half the time. That’s less time you have to take care of it, and less time for it to get infected.
Wounds heal from the bottom up if they don’t close on their own or aren’t closed with stitches. This means a lot more surface area to heal and more exposed tissue to be infected. Your body can spend a few days sealing a well-approximated (edges together) wound, or it can take significantly longer to fill the wound layer by layer with healthy tissue. Delayed wound healing increases the risk of infection.
Various reasons, first it makes it less likely to reopen, second it reduces the probability of infection and finally it usually means the scar is a lot smaller. Keeping the wound secured helps the body heal it better and faster, while it is not always neccesary it definitely is a good idea
I’ve used super glue for stitch worthy cuts. It’s a great DIY and is actually the original purpose of super glue.
Well for one, leaving it wide open significantly increases your chance of infection. It doesn’t take much to go from fine to life threatening.
closing a wound can also reduce scaring, while scars may seem “cool” they can also result in nerve damage which can lead to long term or life long daily pain.
deep wounds also are harder to control bleeding on, stitches help close the wound and stop bleeding.
Sometimes healing wounds the body doesn’t quite figure out where the edges are and will grow the edges into the rim of the line and just leave the middle open. If you put the edges together then you don’t have that issue.
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