Most of us experience a blister at one point or another. Blisters usually occur either from burns or from rubbing. The ones from burns are usually on our fingers or our hand or our arm because often they come from cooking, the ones from rubbing are usually either from shoes or athletic equipment. Bottom line is if you do nothing for a blister, of course it’s going to heal but by not treating it you increase the chances of an infection and it takes longer to heal. If you don’t treat it over a period of time it dries out, the skin breaks, settles down you get a scab or a crust but again allowing that to happen increases the chances of infection and the amount of time it takes and if you treat the blister properly you decrease both of those. So, it really doesn’t take four years of medical education to treat a blister but there are certain steps you should follow. First of all get a good skin disinfectant like Hibiclens, available without a prescription and gently but thoroughly disinfect and cleanse the area where the blister is. In this case were going to assume that the blisters on the back of my hand, so you would disinfect around it and then on the top. Then take some alcohol, and this is 70% rubbing alcohol, Isopropyl, and that’s what’s usually available in your pharmacy. Take some on a cotton pad or a cotton puff and gently again, cleanse and disinfect around the blister and then gently over the roof of the blister. Third, take a needle, most of us use a sewing needle, and the needle needs to be sterilized you can either boil it in water for five minutes or you can put the very tip in a flame like in the stove, for 3 or 4 minutes until it turns red hot and then it’s sterilized but of course please be careful when sterilizing the needle to make sure that you don’t burn yourself. Next, you want to take the needle and puncture the very bottom of the blister. Let’s assume that this is the blister, you take the needle and by puncturing it at the very bottom you will allow for the blister fluid to run out the bottom and the top skin, the dead skin, collapses flat down onto the base. You don’t want to remove the dead skin because it’s very valuable. It serves as a very good, what we call, biologic dressing, and it makes it heal faster and helps to keep it sterile. Next, take some antibiotic ointment, this is bacitracin- you can use polysporin or aquaphor healing ointment. Don’t put the ointment in the top of the blister, rather but the ointment on a band-aid because if you put it on the band-aid and then apply the band-aid on top of the blister there’s less of a chance that you’ll rub off the top surface of that dead skin which again we want to preserve. Change the band-aid and apply new ointment to a new band-aid three or four times a day and that will both speed the healing of the blister as well as helping to prevent and infection.
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