Taking care of the wounds on your body is no different than maintaining the tires on your car or tune-ups on your air conditioning in your home.  If you choose to ignore symptoms of an injury or make decisions that exacerbate your injury, especially if your body has difficulty healing, you run the risk of severe consequences like gangrene, hematoma, amputation, or even death.

By taking steps to prevent and treat a wound that won’t heal, you can safeguard your body against dangerous chronic wounds that can possibly save a limb and help you get back to normal life.

Why Won’t Your Wounds Heal?

There’s no one single reason that you’ve sustained sores or a wound that won’t heal. For most patients, non-healing wounds occur as a result of many factors combined.

High Blood Sugar or Diabetes

Diabetes is the root cause of many wounds that won’t heal because it directly damages the body’s natural healing process.

If you have healthy, balanced blood sugar, any wound on your body triggers a natural response of blood flow, clotting, and scabbing. This process protects your underlying tissues from bacteria and fights infection. Your nearby blood vessels also jump into action to deliver fresh oxygen and nutrients to the wound, which gives powerful white blood cells the opportunity to support rapid wound healing.

This natural response becomes far more difficult if you have diabetes or uncontrolled high blood sugar. Extremely high levels of sugar in the blood impair the function of white blood cells, which in turn stunts the body’s ability to ward off bacteria. As a result, diabetics are more prone to sudden infections and wounds that won’t heal.

Diabetic Neuropathy

Diabetes also poses a threat to rapid wound healing because it triggers a type of nerve damage called diabetic neuropathy. Since excessively high blood sugar levels interfere with the ability of your nerves to send signals, diabetic neuropathy causes tingling and numbness in the hands and feet.

If you are a diabetic with neuropathy, you could step on a nail and not even realize it! Unless you evaluate your feet daily for signs of injury and infection, a wound could fester for days or weeks before you find it. This is the unfortunate case with many diabetics, who don’t notice their wounds until infection has already spread down into the bone. In severe cases, amputation is the only viable treatment option.

Poor Circulation

Poor circulation, often a direct cause of diabetes, further compounds the problem of non-healing wounds. Red blood cells can only deliver nutrients to wounds with the help of proper blood circulation. When diabetes or another health condition slows circulation, wounds become vulnerable to infection and deficient in the nutrients needed to heal.

In fact, a wound deprived of adequate supplies of blood will likely take at least twice as long to heal — if it can heal at all.

Poor Nutrition

Poor eating habits also play a role in slow wound healing because repairing tissue is a calorie-intensive process. If you aren’t eating enough protein, your body can’t sustain the physiological functions needed to heal your wound. It’s recommended to eat double the amount of protein as your wound heals in order to support healthy kidney function and internal healing.  Foods that are high in protein include meat and fish, eggs, dairy products, seeds and nuts, and legumes.

Improper Wound Care

In addition to the root causes of chronic wounds, including diabetes and poor circulation, improper wound care can quickly exacerbate high-risk wounds and interrupt the healing process.

Lack of Offloading

We all know that injuries can’t endure too much pressure, which is exactly why patients of foot, ankle, and leg injuries use wheelchairs and crutches during the recovery process. Eliminating pressure from a wound is known as offloading, and a lack of offloading can interfere with proper wound healing.

This same principle applies to less obvious wounds like foot ulcers. Imagine if a 250-pound patient worked on his feet all day with an existing diabetic foot ulcer. All day long, his full body weight would crush the cells attempting to regenerate and heal his wound. If a specific offloading system isn’t implemented for patients at risk of placing excessive pressure on their wounds, healing may never occur.

Lack of Compression

Compression reduces swelling by increasing pressure in the tissue under the skin. As pressure increases, any excessive fluid build-up in the legs is forced back into the blood vessels. This simple component of wound care offers many essential benefits:

• Prevents the veins from expanding with fluids
• Supports better blood flow and circulation
• Maximizes the flow of oxygen to wound
• Accelerates wound healing

All of this means that neglecting or overlooking compression as a core component of wound care treatment can lead to the formation of chronic non-healing wounds.

Poor Wound Dressing

Dressing your wounds may sound simple, but it’s a critical factor in wound healing. Every type of wound requires its own unique type of dressing to prevent the spread of infection, address fluid drainage, and support tissue repair. If you don’t dress your wound properly, it could damage the surrounding skin.

Failure to Control Infection

Open wounds are highly susceptible to infection, which presents itself with symptoms like redness, warmth, pain, and swelling. The more time bacteria have to multiply, the more difficult it becomes for a wound to heal properly. Infection must be directly addressed with medication before any wound has a chance of long-term recovery.