Understanding Burn Scars

Man's severe burn scar revised

Quality of Life and Scarring
Scars are an inevitable part of most peoples’ lives. There is nearly a person on earth who does not have some type of scarring. Severe scarring though affects individual’s quality of life and often decreases their self image. Self image is so much a part of person’s happiness and success that medical science has gone a long way to reduce the adverse effects of scarring no matter how the scar occurred.

Uniqueness of Burn Scars
Burn scars are often very traumatic, disfiguring and they are the hardest to treat through revision. When a person has significant scarring from burns there is often associated trauma that takes priority prior to addressing the issue of scarring. Life saving measures, infections and other complications take persistent over issues that will arise from burn scars.

Pain management is very vital because the pain from burn is one of the most excruciating types of pain one can bear. Where healthy skin and burned skin intersect pain can be a life time issue. Psychological issues such as severe depression are a compounding factor for people disfigured from burns. Scar tissue does not maintain the suppleness or laxity of healthy skin. As scars mature the fibrotic tissue composing it shrink and becomes more rigid. The location of such scars near joints of the hands, feet, limbs and neck can adversely affect the mobility of the joints.

Another issue with burn scarring is the need for skin grafting and the associated healing and scarring with those procedures. In addition burn scars because of the severity often are comprised of a combination of types of scars. This includes:

• Hypertrophic scarring
• Hypotrophic scarring
• Hyper-pigmentation scarring
• Keloid scarring

The Treatment
Traumatic burn scars necessarily are to be treated in absolute sterile clinical conditions, usually in specialty “burn centers”. Pain management is one of the important reasons as well as reducing the risk of infection to a minimum. Topical numbing creams do not penetrate burn scar tissue sufficiently and medical needling must be done under general anesthetic in most cases. Treatment for burns is a long process that can easily reach up to one year and intervals of specialized care are scheduled through a close monitoring process. It is during these interval medical treatments that the patient and doctor can discuss the possibility or revisioning scars.