One of the things you’ll always find in my medicine cabinet is a bottle of peroxide for wounds and cuts. But some say that’s a bad idea now.
It’s funny how often things that used to be common in medicine cabinets seem to fall out of favor. I can think of three items I used when I was a kid that you can’t find anymore. Now, I’m reading about concerns over a fourth. A recent USA Today article warns that you shouldn’t use peroxide for wounds.
Peroxide has been the first thing I’ve reached for whenever I had a cut or scrape. It has been for years.
It replaced two different antiseptics my parents used on me when I was a kid.
Remember Mercurochrome and Merthiolate?
Both Mercurochrome and Merthiolate looked almost the color of iodine. Children who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s probably still remember the orange stains the stuff left on your skin. Both were supposed to be great at killing germs in little “boo boos.”
The way I remember it, Mercurochrome didn’t sting but Merthiolate stung like an army of fire ants biting all at once. But in reading up on the two little concoctions, most sources insist it was the other way around. If I could go back in time and apply each to a different cut, I bet I could prove those sources wrong.
I guess, at this point, it doesn’t really matter. Both are no longer in production from what I can tell.
There’s a good reason. The first three letters both names share might remind you of a curious element you might have learned about in chemistry class. Yep, I’m talking about the highly-poisonous mercury. Both had trace amounts of it.
Over time, medical experts finally concluded the risk of mercury — along with evidence that both were lousy at killing germs — were enough to pull them from the market.
Remember Paregoric?
Paregoric, on the other hand, was a drug you could depend on to work quite well. Anytime you had either a mouth ulcer or a seriously upset stomach, you could reach for that small little bottle in the medicine cabinet.
You could dip a Q-tip in it, then hold it on an ulcer in your mouth for a few seconds. It would immediately deaden the pain.
When I had a particularly nasty case of stomach flu, my mom would mix one teaspoon of the stuff into a tall glass of Coca-Cola. That stuff would hit your stomach and put an immediate halt to the “proceedings.”
There was just one problem. Perhaps you’ve heard of the opioid crisis? Well, that tiny little bottle of paregoric had as its primary ingredient powdered opium.
You can understand now why you can’t find paregoric anymore. It was always a prescription medication as I recall. But I don’t think doctors even have the option to prescribe it these days.
Now peroxide for wounds is a no-no?
That brings me to the innocent, seemingly harmless hydrogen peroxide. It has plenty of uses, from gargling to lightening hair. For decades, people have used it on cuts and scrapes to help kill germs. Unlike Mercurochrome and Merthiolate, peroxide seems actually to accomplish that goal.
But Los Angeles Emergency Room Dr. Michael Daignault says it’s not a good idea. That’s because our skin knows what to do when there’s a wound. It immediately springs into action, he says:
Hydrogen peroxide unfortunately does not discriminate between bacteria cells and our own cells. While you may think you are thoroughly cleaning your wound, you are causing corrosive tissue damage, significantly impairing the healing process, and irreversibly worsen the scarring process.
Yikes! Who knew?
Simply irrigating the wound and applying a dressing — assuming it’s not so deep that it might require stitches — should generally be enough.
So that’s four items that I either can no longer get or shouldn’t use.
There’s no telling what might be the fifth thing medical science “cancels.” I hope they leave Pepto Bismol alone. There’s not much else in my medicine cabinet at this point!
