What is a sport wound? Most common sport wounds
People love sports, as participants or spectators. For some, the appeal is the adrenalin rush, for others it’s the joy of belonging to a team for others, it’s some kind of primal urge to push limits. We participate in sports in spite of the risk of injury, and those risks are many. Risks range from life altering injuries like spinal cord injuries; to those that take a few weeks or months to heal, like sprains, fractures, broken bones, and torn tendons; to less severe ones like open cuts and wounds or minor scrapes and bruises.
This article is about these less severe injuries.Whatever sport you do, whether your sport involves a wheel or a ball, whether you do your sport on a track, a court or in water, chances are, you can end up with road rash if you’re lucky, or an open wound if you’re less so. Road rash is the common expression used for describing a kind of abrasion where the skin has been scraped off. Road rash occurs mostly in outdoor activities like skateboarding and riding a bike, that are typically done on concrete or asphalt. It can also happen on smoother surfaces too, if you are going at a high speed, such as going down one of those huge slides you might see at an amusement park, or coming in contact with the gym floor at an unfortunate speed and angle. Road rash can be very painful, and the skin will appear red, raw, swollen, and inflamed. There will likely be some bleeding. Since the skin is the body’s first line of defense, it is no surprise that road rash can lead to infection. You can fairly suspect an infection if the pain increases after the first day. There shouldn’t be any fluid or pus draining from your rash. Also look for increased redness, swelling and warmth. Sometimes an infection is accompanied by flue-like symptoms like chills, fever and body aches.
Typically, road rashes heals in two or three weeks with proper treatment at home. Open wounds, though, are more complicated and take a bit longer to heal. Some sports expose you to greater risk of getting an open wound, more than others. Lacerations (deep cuts) and bruising are common injuries associated with wakeboarding, waterskiing, surfing and Jetskiing. This isn’t surprising; these sports involve hitting the water at high speeds, plus some of them involve equipment that you might hurt yourself against. Lacerations that are more than a quarter of an inch deep and three quarters of an inch long, have jagged edges, and gape open when you move the body part, are considered major. Such wounds might cut down to deep structures and bleed nonstop; these require medical care.
General treatment of sport wounds
If you find yourself with a nasty road rash, or even a deeper cut, three basic things will set you on the road to healing. The first is to clean the area of all debris or foreign matter. The second is to disinfect the area; common wound cleaners are alcohol, peroxide and saline solution. The third is to maintain optimal conditions for healing, this includes keeping the right moisture level and protecting the area from infection.
The advantages of using SilverStream
SilverStream is a major league, all-in-one wound management system that does all three things; it cleans, disinfect and maintains the level of moisture that is optimal for healing. SilverStream cleans debris and dead tissue, as well as absorbs pus.Developed by a group of researchers in Tel Aviv University, SilverStream is approved for use in the USA, Israel, India and several other countries. It has been used to treat more than quarter-million patients with excellent results and adverse effects. Clinical trials found that patients who used SilverStream in the treatment of wounds, healed 30-50% faster than those who didn’t.
How to use SilverStream to Treat your skin after sport wounds?
- Use gauze soaked in SilverStream® to clean your road rash or other minor cuts and bruises.
- The product comes in a gel form as well that you can rub onto the affected area to supercharge the healing process.
- For deeper cuts, instead of gauze, use some kind of device such as a syringe, bulb or spray bottle, to squirt SilverStream into the wound to wash away debris and slough.