Red Cross Blogs

Buttering burns is a first aid horror

By Mark Cox
March 9, 2010 at 10:26 am

If someone gashed their arm, I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t stuff jam into the wound. And yet every year, lots of people apply butter – yes, that yellow creamy stuff you put on bread – onto burn injuries.

In terms of bonkers first aid behaviour, it’s right up there with blood-letting and ducking someone to see if they’re infected by evil spirits. And yet, incredibly, it’s still quite a popular first aid myth.

You know when you lavish the Lurpak on a toasted crumpet and all the butter bubbles and melts and starts seeping in? Well, that’s exactly what happens when you do the same to someone’s skin. It can be really damaging – and excruciating to get off again (especially if they’re also trying to spoon out all that jam from your gashed arm).

Office worker Michael Brown recently helped a workmate who had scalded her arm with piping hot tea. Thanks to his Red Cross training at work, he knew exactly what to do: run her arm under cold running water then cover the affected area to prevent infection. However, he was slightly taken aback by how helpless – even clueless – most people around him seemed.

He recalled: “It was alarming that most of my colleagues, who were understandably distressed, wanted to soak her arm in warm water [which would not cool the injury as required] and didn’t want the burn to be covered.”

When the woman was later treated for a second degree burn at hospital, the doctors said Michael’s speedy first aid actions had really helped, but without him things could easily have gone the other way.

As he put it: “This is another classic example of people thinking they should do the opposite of what should actually be done.”

Incidentally, while researching this blog I came across a website about medieval first aid. It makes for scary reading, as the following extract shows: “Some cures – such as one that involved bathing in water in which blind puppies had been boiled to death – defy modern explanation.” Ouch.

Unsurprisingly, it concludes: “Medieval medicine had a low success rate.”

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Tags: burns, emergency response, First aid, first aid tips, first aid training, red cross, volunteer, Volunteering

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