treatyourscars Typically, bruises are collections of blood beneath the skin, which will quickly heal when treated with R.I.C.E.–rest, ice, compression, elevation–and pain medications. A bruise is caused when you have injured soft tissues, which causes bleeding underneath your skin from broken blood vessels. A bruise occurs when the small blood vessels beneath the skin are ripped or broken, most commonly as the result of an impact or falling.
Scars are more common with injuries in which the skin is damaged as much as it is cut, crushed, or otherwise damaged. Anytime the skin is damaged, the potential exists for scarring, which is the natural bodys way of healing a gaping wound. Instead of healing in scar tissue, the healing process will cause blood to ossify, turning it into bone tissue. Without anywhere to go, blood gets trapped beneath your skin, creating a reddish or purplish spot that is sensitive when you touch it–a bruising.
Within 24 hours or so, a bruise turns black, blue, or deep purple, because more blood pools in the area. Over time, a bruise changes colors as the blood underneath your skin breaks down, as well as when your bruise is healing. As your body heals and breaks down the hemoglobin, the compounds that give blood its red color, the bruise changes in color. Applying a cold compress to the bruise helps to slow down the blood flowing into the area, reducing the amount that ends up flowing through to your tissues.
After 48 hours or so, heat, in the form of a warm washcloth or warm heating pad applied to a bruise for 10 minutes two to three times per day, can increase the flow of blood into the bruised area, which allows your skin to absorb blood more rapidly. Home treatments can accelerate healing and alleviate swelling and pain, which are common with bruising caused by injuries.
Medical treatment of unusual bleeding or bruising is focused on stopping or stopping bleeding, changing or adjusting the medication that might cause bleeding or treating the medical problem that caused the bleeding.
Wounds can include bites, cuts, punctures, burns, scratches, insect bites, or any injury that can break the skin. Certain diseases and conditions can include genetic, congenital, and other disorders that can cause low weight gain, fractures, or skin lesions similar to bruises or burns. Scars may result from surgery, burns, cuts, grazes, acne, skin infections, chickenpox, and scratches.
Hypertrophic scars can happen anywhere on your skin where you have had an injury or wound to the skin. If hypertrophic scars develop above your joints, it may restrict movement, so you might want to get treatment for it. You might want to get them checked out by a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon, because they may hide skin cancer (they are not cancerous on their own). Hypertrophic scars are most common on areas of your body where your skin is tight, like your back, chest, shoulders, and upper arms, elbows, and other joints.
Scars appear more often in your body’s upper trunk — your back, chest, shoulders, upper arms — and on skin covering joints. Keloid scars are raised above your skin and may be pink, red, the same color as, or darker than, surrounding skin. Unlike a regular scar, the keloid tends to grow past the border of the initial wound — making it look raised.
In some cases, cuts may cause unpleasant, painful, and quite itchy scars called keloids, which may develop long after an injury to the skin has occurred. Some scars caused by skin conditions, such as acne and chickenpox, may look sunken in or pitted. Pitted scars, also known as atrophic or icepick scars, may also develop from injury, which causes a loss of the fat underneath. Scar tissue may develop as a result of injuries to the skin or from injuries caused by accidents, inflammation, burns, and surgical incisions.
Hypertrophic scarring is an abnormal reaction to wound healing where additional connective tissue forms inside of the initial injury site. Intramuscular bruises — Some injuries may cause a pooling area of blood within the muscle, which may impair the muscle’s function and limit movement.
- Intermuscular Bruises — Blood may also collect between layers of muscles, but not actually pool in the muscle itself.
- Deep Bruises – This term refers to any bruise resulting in significant amounts of blood collecting within and around the muscle tissue. A bruising is the collection of blood that occurs when blood vessels are severed, and the blood of damaged cells, deep below the skin, collects close to the skins surface, producing black and blue marks.
- Extramuscular bruises — The most common type of bruise is a collection of blood directly under the skin, that occurs quickly following an impact or injury.
Frequent Bruises Frequent or heavy bruising may result from low or abnormal platelet counts in your blood, or from problems with coagulation. Bruising does not go away on your legs If you have peptic ulcers or bruises on your legs or calves that do not heal, this may be because you are missing platelets. Bone bruising typically heals by itself, but a small percentage may result in joint problems or fractures.
Usually, bruising is a superficial wound requiring no medical care, people can heal it themselves.
In most cases, scarring is left, which will eventually disappear, but the extent of scarring, and the extent to which it fades, is determined by many factors, including a patient’s age, skin tone and complexion, size and depth of incision, and how quickly the patients skin heals (determined by genetic factors).
