Medical Mysteries BUTTER ON THE BURN? GRANDMA WAS WRONG

Some of us are cursed with chronic klutziness. We constantly bang into things and have an assortment of small cuts and bruises.

Band-Aids are our best friends. We also seem to be attracted to heat sources— like burners on a stove. So what do you do when you have a burn? Grandma’s advice was simple and straightforward—slather butter all over it. It’ll relieve the pain and speed up healing.

No disrespect to the grandmas of the world, but this time she was dead wrong. The medical authorities agree. “Any greasy substance on a burn keeps heat in and could make it hard for a burn to heal or be properly treated,” according to the University of Rochester Medical Center.

“Putting butter or other greasy ointments on a burn may actually make things worse, since the grease will slow the release of heat from the skin. This causes more damage from the retained heat,” says the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. And Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center echoes the thought: “Putting butter on a burn quite likely does more harm than good.”

While Grandma certainly helped spread the “butter on a burn” myth, it probably started with the Prussian Surgeon General Friedrich Von Esmarch.

The BBC said that Von Esmarch “recommended in his influential 19th Century handbook on battlefield medicine that burnt surfaces should be covered with oil, grease or butter. The idea was to seal the burn off from the air, keep it clean, prevent infection and help the healing process.”

The notion of using butter on burns is a fairly recent folk remedy but the idea of using exotic treatments to treat burns has been around for centuries. The ancient Greeks used rendered pig fat to treat burns while the Romans used a mixture of honey and bran followed by cork and ashes.

The ancient Egyptians, however, win the prize for coming up with the weirdest ways to treat burns.

Egyptian papyrus dating back to 1500 B.C. says they used mud, excrement, frogs boiled in oil, and fermented goat dung.

It is highly unlikely that Egyptians got their advice on burns from grandmas. It probably came from grandmummies.

Sources

“Should you put butter on a burn?” by Claudia Hammond, BBC, August 20, 2013, http://www.bbc. com/future/story/20130820-should-you-put-butteron-a-burn

“How to Avoid Common First Aid Mistakes,” Health Encyclopedia, University of Rochester Medical Center, https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=4543

“Will putting butter on a burn ease the pain?” Medical Myths, Health Library, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, http://uamshealth.com/ healthlibrary2/medicalmyths/butterforburns/

“True or False: Applying Butter to a Burn Aids Healing and Relieves Pain,” by Diane Stresing, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital, http://www. bidmc.org/YourHealth/Holistic-Health/Health-MythsCenter.aspx?ChunkID=156971

“First Aid: Burns,” First Aid & Injury Prevention, FamilyDoctor.org, http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/prevention-wellness/staying-healthy/first-aid/ first-aid-burns.html

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