Burns Health Video

Video Transcript

DR. LORETTA CIRALDO MD, FAAD: Hi. I'm Dr. Loretta Ciraldo, a voluntary professor of Dermatology at University of Miami and a practicing dermatologist for nearly 30 years. Burns are something that is so common whether they're a kitchen burn or a burn from something that happened at work and there's really the sense that so many people have them. "Gee wiz, I've just got this burn. What do I remember from my first day of classes in junior high school?" So I want to review with you a little bit what to do if you should get a burn. Obviously, if you're in a bad situation and get a burn over a large extent of your body, please call 911 immediately. But if you happened to suffer from something like a small kitchen burn, then here's what to do. First of all, remember that when you get a burn, immediately try to lower the temperature of the affected skin by applying ice. You want to do this as quickly as possible and you want to keep the ice on and off for about the next 6 hours after you have got a burn. The second thing is that burns can also become infected unfortunately, because there is an area of our skin where we lose our natural skin barrier. So you want to keep the burn area clean and things like hydrogen peroxide can be very effective at keeping the burn clean. You typically don't want to use neomycin-containing antibiotics, but you may want to ask your doctor for a prescription called Silvadene which is a wonderful topical cream that you can put on burns to remedy them faster and hopefully minimize any scar that could result from a burn.