Abstract
Wound debridement is a critical element of wound care. Debridement should reduce
or eliminate factors that can impede healing and stimulate the normal wound-healing cascade. The objective of debriding a wound is to remove nonviable tissue and
chronic inflammatory byproducts (5-7). Surgical debridement can help ‘‘convert’’
a chronic wound to an acute one. There are a variety of techniques to debride a
wound with little specific documentation addressed in the medial literature to
compare chemical, mechanical, insect, or surgical methods (8). In patients with adequate blood flow, surgical debridement and excision of devitalized tissue is preferable.
Steed et al. (9), in an important post hoc analysis of patients enrolled in a randomized
controlled trial of topical growth factors, reported that significantly more patients
healed in centers that had more frequent wound debridement regardless of the
treatment group.