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
This is the same line of thinking as saying why drive to work when you can just walk 10 miles. Sure you could but that’s a worse option. Stitches will help the wound heal
Big cuts are big opportunities for germs to get in and cause infection.
Seal it up and keep the germs out.
There’s one more point that hasn’t been touched on yet, and that’s skin flexibility. Lots of your movement is reliant on having skin that can loosen and tighten when needed as muscle is relaxed and stretched, and poorly-healed wounds in these places can develop very complex scars that interfere with that flexibility a lot — even to the point of limiting motion.
I’m a wound care specialist.
Sometimes stitching can help it heal faster, but only when the cut is clean and fresh. If you attach the two sides and get lucky sometimes they just grow into each other. This is called primary intention.
Now let’s say it wasn’t a clean cut, or it failed to heal, got infected etc.
Then we let it heal without stitching. Wounds have to heal bottom up and then edge in. This takes more time but sometimes is better. We call this secondary intention.
First the base will fill with red meaty stuff called granulation tissue, then the skin heals from the edges over.
Sometimes we have do what is called delayed primary. Where we leave it open enough to make sure it is clean and then stitch it later
There is a myth that wounds can’t be stitched after the first 24 hours and it isn’t true, we just have limited reason to.
A lot of surgical wounds start as primary, do a process call dehisce (where the sides don’t join, bacteria will build up and pop open the stitches) then we have to do secondary intention.
Wound care is actually a complicated field and most doctors and nurses are poorly trained in it. There is a lot to it.
I had a cyst removed and it was layed open, meaning it was never closed after incision. They just packed the inch deep hole with gauze so it’d heal from the bottom up, and each day they just had to put a little less in to fill it.
The stitches help it heal faster and cleaner, with less chance of infection.
Yes, your body *could* probably heal it on its own… But stitches help!
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