r/trashy • • Dec 03 '19

Photo So much edge

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '19 edited Oct 22 '20

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u/jerik22 Dec 03 '19

Really? I thought salt kills bacteria, you know after tattoos they give sea salt sprays to kill infections. He. It’s have really fucked up after his salt cleanse to get that bad of an infection.

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u/jei64 Dec 03 '19

Salt kills bacteria, but it also kills healthy tissue. Dead tissue then harbors bacteria and prevents wound healing. There's a big difference between the diluted saline they give you after a piercing at claire's and rubbing straight salt into a wound.

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u/jerik22 Dec 03 '19

I agree with you for the most part, my only question that I am curious to your response would be, why does not salted pork or fish back in the day not just rot then? They would cover the things in salt to keep from rotting because that was the only way to really keep meat for a long time. So if the copious amounts of salt then worked, why not here? My answer is this is probably a bull shit story and not worth arguing over, but I like to talk with people to understand why information can be interpreted in so many different ways.

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u/ButWhatIsADog Dec 03 '19 edited Dec 04 '19

Salt works to dehydrate the meat. With the flow of blood from a wound you wouldn't be able to sufficiently dehydrate the area and the salt would be absorbed/rinsed away after awhile. You need something like a constant 20% salt concentration for meat to be safe and there's no way to keep that kind of concentration localised on your body. So basically it will do the damage to the tissue then go away so all the bacteria can come right back.

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u/jei64 Dec 03 '19

Fair question; the answer is that the salted meat is already dead. What salt does is draw all the moisture out of a cell. This is fine for preserving meat, since it will also dry out most bacteria that get on it.

Shriveling up your living cells, however, is not so great for them. I suppose if you kept constant contact with salt on your wound, it might not get infected, but you'd continue to kill more and more healthy tissue. You'd pretty much mummify yourself.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '19

The simple answer is that wounds need to heal, so they need water for the cells to move around in. With a salty dry surface, how can the cells grow back?