Everyone gets scrapes and bruises every now and then. But what should you do when its more than a simple bump and your wound just will not heal?
If you have sustained an injury that won’t go away, you might benefit from advanced wound healing or hyperbaric treatment. As the only UHMS Certified Facility in the region, NMC Health’s Wound Healing & Hyperbaric Center is one of the foremost wound healing specialist facilities in Kansas. With a full team of specialist medical staff, we know it can take more than slapping a bandage on your wound for it to heal.
So what can you do to help your body heal and get you back to your old self? Read on to find out.
How to help my wound heal
When it comes to a wound that just won’t heal, doing the same old thing may not be an option. Sometime lifestyle changes are needed for your body to heal. Some important additions to your lifestyle that can help your wound heal faster include:
- Proper hydration
- Diet
- Exercise
- Rest
At the same time, you may need to cut out some bad habits from your lifestyle to see the results you’re looking for. Smoking and vaping reduce blood flow and limit your body’s ability to heal. If we’re going to give your cells the help they need to heal, it may also mean choosing eggs instead of donuts for breakfast.
Sometimes even after making these changes, your body still needs help to get your wound healed up.
What if my wound just doesn’t heal on its own?
A non-healing wound can be much more than dealing with an open sore. Lesions, painful movement, bulky bandages and sometimes the smell of an infection can alter your self-image and quality of life.
Unfortunately, it’s often not as easy as putting a band-aid on your wound and calling it a day. Sometimes it takes the care of a wound care specialist to get you back on your feet. If your wound just is not healing, you may benefit from advanced wound care or hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
But how can you tell if you may need this type of care?
Do I need Wound Care?
Sometimes you can’t simply slap a band-aid and ointment on a wound to get the necessary healing. Here are four things to look for that indicate your wound may need more attention:
- It has been longer than 30 days since you first noticed the wound and it is not healing or it is healing slower than you’d like it to
- Your pain has increased
- You’re still seeing drainage, or it has increased
- The wound still has a lot of redness or redness has increased. Sometimes increased redness and swelling around a wound site can indicate an infection. If you suspect you have an infection, call your doctor.
If you aren’t already working with your primary care provider to heal your wound, set up an appointment as soon as possible. If you have been working with your doctor, ask them to check into advanced wound care and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy at the NMC Health Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Center.
The truth is that some wounds are harder to heal because of underlying illnesses like diabetes or heart disease. Maybe you struggle with a circulatory condition like peripheral arterial disease or peripheral venous disease. Maybe your wounds are tough to heal because they are from a spider bite or accident.
There are a ton of reasons why your wound may not be healing. We are here to help with all of them. So what can you expect from your treatment while in our care? And what exactly is Advanced Wound Care? What about Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?
While they may look like big scary terms, they’re really quite simple concepts that allow us to make HUGE progress in your wound healing journey. You can learn more about Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy by clicking the button below. We’ll carry on by going over advanced wound care and what to expect from your treatment at NMC Health Wound Healing & Hyperbaric Center.
What is Advanced Wound Care?
Accidents, burns, cancer treatments, diabetes and other conditions can leave you with hard-to-heal wounds that need advanced care to heal properly. But what is advanced wound care?
When traditional healing methods have been unable to help your wound heal or you suffer from chronic wounds like diabetic foot ulcers or other major wounds following an accident or radiation treatments, you may benefit from advanced wound care. Advanced wound care uses multidiscipline and state-of-the-art wound healing treatments to help you return to a healthy and better quality of life. That means that you will receive the most modern treatment from several different areas of medicine combined to form as effective a treatment as possible to heal your wound.
Advanced wound healing is a highly specialized process tailored to the specific needs of each patient. Here’s a little bit of what to expect.
Step one: Identify the type of wound and what caused it
Wounds are difficult to heal for a variety of reasons. Our expert team provides comprehensive nutritional, infectious and vascular evaluations to identify your wounds specific needs and develop a specialized and individualized treatment plan for your wound and body.
Step two: Establish the treatment plan
Advanced wound care is different for each patient and your individualized treatment plan reflects that. Your plan may include a number of treatment options like:
- Advanced biologic dressings
- Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (flooding damaged tissue with concentrated oxygen to stimulate cell growth)
- Skin grafts
- Surgical debridement (removal of dead/dying tissue)
- Inpatient and outpatient consulting
At NMC Health’s Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Center, a multidiscipline team specializing in wound care, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, emergency medicine and infectious disease work together to help provide the best results possible.
Step three: Patience and discipline
Advanced wound care can stop and may even reverse damage caused by non-healing wounds, but the complete healing process doesn’t happen overnight. It is usually a long-term treatment plan. In addition, the successful healing process often includes a lot of discipline on the part of the patient.
Whether it is tending to dressings, attending appointments or making necessary dietary and lifestyle changes, positive outcomes are usually the result of slow and steady progress and consistent care.
What wounds does NMC Health treat?
Healing is needed in spirit, mind and body. That is why our expert team believes you’re not just a patient – you are family. Our treatments are a relationship to heal the whole person. We understand that long-term wounds can be isolating because they often restrict activities.
That’s why we’re thrilled to hear about that vacation you were finally able to take. That’s why we celebrate with you when you finally felt good enough to go to your grandchild’s graduation or you’re able to stand up from your wheelchair without excruciating pain.
Our exceptional wound care team mobilizes the powers of caring, wisdom and expert skills to triumph over wounds you may have thought were impossible to heal. As the only UHMS certified facility for hyperbaric treatment in the region, you know you’ll receive the best care available at NMC Health Wound Healing & Hyperbaric Center. Some of the ailments that we treat include:
- Diabetic ulcers
- Soft tissue infections
- Post-operative wounds
- Pressure ulcers (bed sores)
- Spider bites
- Traumatic wounds
- Venous stasis ulcers (weeping lower legs)
These conditions and others can leave you with wounds that need advanced care to heal properly. Our award-winning team has a record of stellar patient outcomes and satisfaction scores. Run by our professional wound-certified nurses and full-time wound physician, these caregivers treat you like family – taking care of wounds, minds and spirits.
How fast will my wound heal with treatment from NMC Health?
A frequent misconception about advanced wound healing and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is that it makes wounds magically disappear. Advanced wound healing does not mean your wound will heal overnight.
While our specialized biologic dressings and HBOT are pretty remarkable, there is no hocus pocus involved. NMC Health’s Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Center treatments tap into and speed up your body’s natural ability to regenerate healthy tissue.
It’s like when you grab a cup of coffee to get moving in the morning. Our specialized wound treatment methods are kind of like giving your cells a double espresso jolt to kick wound healing into gear.
If you have struggled with a non-healing wound, NMC Health’s Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Center can help reverse the course of persistent pain and infection, allowing your body to recover and new tissue to generate. But healing takes time.
Our expert team works with you step-by-step to make sure healing progresses. Our telemedicine service even allows for you to have your follow-up appointment from the comfort of your own home.
Ready to heal like never before?
