How to treat boils

What people call boils in daily life are medically called furuncles. They are a purulent infection of hair follicles and their surrounding tissues. The infection of a single hair follicle is called scabies. If several adjacent hair follicles are infected and inflamed, it is called carbuncle. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that boils are caused by heat toxins in the human skin. Boils are most likely to appear on the face, head, back, buttocks and neck. The feet are also prone to growth.

How can you tell if you have a boil? Gram staining and bacterial culture of the skin lesions can support the diagnosis, and the diagnosis can be made by testing the blood of the boil to see if the white blood cell count is increased. There is a folk saying: Every boil will eventually heal. This is talking about the pathological process of carbuncle. At the beginning, redness and swelling will appear, and then it will gradually grow larger and present a cone-shaped protrusion.

After a few days, a yellow-white pus plug will appear. After a period of time, the pus plug will fall off by itself, and the pus inside will be discharged, and the boil will slowly disappear. In other words, under normal circumstances, boils can heal themselves. However, some critically ill patients, if not treated in time, will not only fail to recover on their own, but will also have high fever, trembling all over, and even coma, and in severe cases may even die.

Therefore, once a boil appears, you must go to the hospital for treatment. One point that needs to be emphasized here is that boils that grow in the triangular area from the sides of the nose to the lips and to the chin must not be scratched by yourself, otherwise the bacteria will enter the patient's skull through the veins and may endanger the patient's life. So this area is called the "danger triangle".

To treat a mature boil, you can make an incision and drain it to release the pus and blood. However, for an immature boil, do not squeeze it. You can take antibiotics orally and apply antibiotic ointment externally to treat it. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is believed that carbuncle is caused by excessive toxic fire in the human body, so you can ask your doctor to prescribe some medicines for clearing away heat and detoxifying. This way, you can treat both the symptoms and the root cause and easily cure carbuncle.