I’m in the middle of a crazy busy class schedule and we’ve had some super interesting class discussions. Here’s one from last week.
A class participant shares that in his family they treat burns on the hand by holding an aluminum can. Discussion ensued on the contents and temperature of the can. He insisted it could be an empty can as aluminum disperses heat.
I can only at this point repeat the instructions from the course material. Rinse with cool water and apply a dry gauze dressing if needed. But I’m always open to researching new ideas, we Googled it and could only find an article on using aluminum foil after rinsing a burn. So I post the question in one of the online instructor forums I belong to.
After a brief discussion about using a cool beer, a reply suggested that if the can were empty it might dissipate heat across the surface but it would not contact the skin like water or a wet dressing.
So would it work? Maybe. But ultimately rinsing with cool water is the best treatment.
The article we found online about using aluminum foil had a number of inaccuracies and a few suggestions that could make the burn worse or more painful. Not something I’d recommend and I won’t provide a link to it.
Other than water, and a dry dressing, you can use a commercially available product called Water-Jel to treat a burn.
After reading this you might think…. where do these questions come from? Who asks this type of stuff? Honestly I love questions in class. It lets me know the participants are thinking about the material and are really focused and paying attention.