ITCHING

[Angie!! 24]

OmG.....my incision sites itch so damn much! When will this go away?

[Pixie Dust 526]

Mine only lasted a few days but I would take an ice cube & rub it on the incisions & it would calm it down.

[Arts137 1,811]

Any of the 'good' Rx pain killers might be increasing the itch as well...

[gmanbat 5,889]

For the curious:

Now when you have a wound, the wound closes by cells around the margins of the wound, proliferating, in other words, growing and they then migrate from the margins of the wound, down into the base of the wound. They actually follow the electrical gradient, a guy in Aberdeen discovered in the last 5 years or so that the inside of the wound is at a different voltage than the margin, and the cells flow down this electrical gradient, so they know where the base of the wound is. They then unite with their cellular counterparts, and stitch themselves into place. Then they start to contract, contractile filaments which pull the wound closed.

So as they do that, they're eliciting a mechanical stress which the itch sensitive nerves will respond to and at the same time, there are various other factors which get released in a healing wound, chemicals which provoke healing in the wound, but also, upregulate the activity of these itch sensitive nerves.

So therefore, a wound that's closing up will feel itchy for mechanical and chemical reasons which are precisely the reasons why those nerve cells get stimulated in the first place. So that's the reason.

The whole article: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/question/2967/

[ccm2n 28]

Great info

[FRED1977 186]

After 4 weeks I no longer had any itches.... It was very irritating and painful.