Skin Can Repair Itself? How?

To answer that question, let's start by watching this video:

By: canaldoandroido

Seems a bit complicated, right? There are many things going on inside your body when you break your skin, such as getting a paper cut, or falling off the bike.

However, let's first go over what your skin is made of, according to Ms. Apple's lecture at Wallenberg High School. Think of your skin like a garden. Your skin is composed of three layers;

•  the hypodermis, the bottom layer which has fat tissue, like the deep soil which has more nutrients
•  the dermis, the middle layer which has the oil and sweat glands, like seeds of a plant in the soil
• and finally, the epidermis, the outermost layer, which covers up the entire body, like the grass which covers the dirt.

So, when you get a cut or scrape yourself, how does your skin repair itself?

There a couple steps to this:

1. You bleed and your white blood cells go to the wound site and release histamines, which causes you to feel that pain

2. Your blood coagulates, or thickens, and a scab will form over the wound site

3. Stem cells, inside your body, move to that site and turn into new skin cells

4. Fibrin and collagen, kind of like a blueprint, form to give the structure for the cells to attach to

5. Lastly, your skin heals.

6. However, if your body produces too much fibrin and collagen in the previous step, that is when a scar will form instead.

Now that you know a little more on how the skin repairs itself, try watching the video again to see if you understand it better.

People should understand how the skin can repair itself because not a lot of people really know how, or why skin repairs itself the way it does. Some people, when they break skin, don't heal as fast. They get scars, instead of having the skin repair itself like the way it was before the injury. However, some people suffer injuries that are more severe than just letting the wound heal itself, which is why learning about how skin heals can be beneficial.

Let's take a turn into a different direction. I want to talk about how you can use your own skin to repair other parts of your skin. You now know how the skin can repair itself with the different things going underneath the skin. But how can you take skin from another part of your body? This process is called skin grafting.

What is skin grafting? According to Medline Plus, skin grafting is skin that's removed from one part of your body, called the donor site, and is transplanted to the affected area.

There are two types of skin grafting. The first is called split-thickness, which takes the top two layers of skin, and is usually for patients with less serious injuries. The second one is called full-thickness,  which takes the full thickness of the skin, and is usually for patients with more serious injuries.

During surgery, you are put under general anesthesia, and the doctor, usually a plastic surgeon, will take a patch of healthy skin, large or small depending on the affected area, and the patch will be used on the area that needs the skin. The video below will show how a split-thickness skin graft surgery looks like.

By: Dr Thomas McClellan

I hope that you have learned something new about skin that you did not know before. If you ever do get a cut or scrape some part of your body, you will know what is going on inside your body and how your skin is trying to repair itself. If you ever suffer an injury that would require skin-grafting, you will know how surgeons will help that injury recover.

Was there something new or interesting that you learned about skin repair and/or skin grafting? Leave a comment below.