Why Bleeding Is Good

Ever scraped yourself and been told to squeeze it to make it bleed?  The point of bleeding is to clean the wound- if you don't allow it to get cleaned out, the bacteria and fungi, and perhaps a errant piece of gravel, that entered the body when the skin was broken will not be flushed out.

So, as seems to be the case lately, I was reading the Sunday paper and clipping my coupons when I came across a new product:

Curad's Blood Stop Gauze
For small scratches, scrapes, and nose bleeds.

I can't tell you want a bad idea this product is.

First off, for small scrapes and scratches, you're going to WANT them to bleed a bit to wash out the nasty stuff, like I mentioned above.  So, using this product, you'll seal them in under a mountain of "cellulose gel".

That sounds good, right?

You'd only really want to stop bleeding quickly in BIG cuts...which means you're probably en-route to the doctor's anyway.  You're beach towel will probably be fine (well, it was for my knee when I cut it open as a kid).

Now, I have had my fair share of LONG bloody noses.  LONG.  Fifteen, twenty minutes in my youth.  I tried tipping my head backwards, forwards, ice on the back of my neck- yeah none of that worked.  But when I went to the doctor to ask him about it, he said DO NOT try to pack your nose by yourself.  The likelihood of either breaking the small bones in the nose or shoving it too far back is VERY great.  So, LET A DOCTOR pack a nose.  Otherwise, you might lobotomize yourself.  (That's how they used to get the brains out of corpses in ancient Egypt was by sticking stuff up the nose and pulling it out.)

With this in mind, I have to wonder, Curad, being a health products brand...wouldn't they KNOW that!?

Finally, you have to ask yourself what IS this cellulose gel is manufactured from?  It's "biocompatible"...

Corn?

Wheat?

Soy?

Peanuts?

Dead people?

Don't laugh- some of the hormones that they give people now are harvested from cadavers.  I'm SO not kidding.  And Premarin- that's boiled down from pregnant horse urine.

So you do have to ask, "What is this stuff and am I going to have a bad reaction to it?"

If you're allergic to the source of the cellulose, do you really want to be putting it right into your bloodstream?  I'm going to wager, NO.

In fact, the only people that I can think might benefit from this product are those with hemophilia; this might buy them enough time to get to the hospital to actually get something to stop the bleeding.

So, if you have hemophilia, and you're not allergic to anything, you'll probably want to check out this product.