Skip to main content

Coconut Oil for Road Rash from Hazardous Exercise

My bike accident a few days ago left me with bad road rash. To help keep it from getting infected, I've been applying coconut oil to my scrapes and rinsing my mouth with it. In my last post, I linked to a couple of papers about coconut oil's ability to kill certain bacteria, and in some cases, its superiority over traditional antibiotics. So far, I don't have any infection.

What has surprised me is how fast my scrapes are healing. I don't have a photo of myself from four days ago, but the pink spot on my chin was a bad scrape, so red the nurse called it a cherry. She put two bandages on it. Here's how it looks today:

This isn't Photoshopped--there's just a rosy pink spot of intact skin and no scar. Same story with my knee. Look very closely above my kneecap and you can see the thin brown outline of where a large bandage was.


I didn't bother applying coconut oil to a scrape on my foot. It was small, so I figured it would be fine on its own. After a few days, though, I started putting coconut oil on it, too. (In fairness, the nurse didn't clean this one since it was hidden by my sock.)


I've been using unrefined coconut oil, applied twice a day.

This misadventure has got me thinking about the cult of exercise. How many injuries come from "healthy" exercise like biking, running, and other sports? When I worked at the Air Force Academy, where cadets are required to play a sport, around 10% of them at any time were in a cast. The receptionist at the orthopedic doctor's office said they saw bike injuries all the time; my best friend mentioned she flipped over on her bike last week; my dentist's wife broke her thumb the same way. Listen in on a few random conversations at the salon or the break room and you'll hear someone saying they got injured in an exercise class. Look at any running magazine and you'll see an article on injuries.

If you're really good on a bike or need it for transportation, I wouldn't discourage you from riding one. Same if you enjoy a sport so much you're willing to suffer the inevitable injuries. But I'd like to see an end to the idea of somewhat hazardous recreation passing for being part of a healthy lifestyle. Various studies have shown that huffing and puffing doesn't do much for weight loss (see Dr. Briffa's blog). For weight loss, diet is where it's at. Next time someone goes on about healthy exercise like biking, feel free to send them this photo.

Injury from falling off a bike. Not shown: a broken tooth, two displaced teeth, braces, and a fractured arm.


Comments

Angel said…
I've always used lavender essential oil on my scrapes, which does help them heal faster, but this sounds interesting too. I would imagine it would be even better for the skin (well, at least dry skin) since the oil would help retain moisture (under the skin's surface, where it needs to be).

I completely agree with you about the cult of exercise. Unless you are doing it because you REALLY enjoy it and are therefore willing to tolerate the occasional and inevitable injury, why bother? My primary physical hobby is napping, which I do as often as possible. :)
Lori Miller said…
That makes sense--lavender is also a natural antibiotic, put to good use in World War I, as I recall.

I talked to a guy today whose sister-in-law spent two weeks in a coma from a bike accident.

Popular posts from this blog

An Objective Book about Other Childhood Vaccines

Today's decision by the CDC to add COVID shots to the schedule of childhood vaccines has some people concerned about the rest of the vaccines on the schedule. Contrary to fact-checker claims, adding COVID shots to the schedule means children will be required in about a dozen states to get a COVID shot to attend public school. Indiana isn't one of them--our childhood vaccination law doesn't mention the CDC and such a requirement could run afoul of our ban on COVID vaccine passports. But even freewheeling Indiana has some vaccine requirements and this kerfuffle has people wondering how safe those vaccines are.  There's a book called Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy  by Peter C. Gotzsche, DrMedSci and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, about the safety and efficacy of all those vaccines, including COVID and others. Cochrane was founded to "to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving healt

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and