Sweat heals all wounds
The healing power of sweating. Researchers at the University of Michigan recently published a study. In it, they explain why wounds heal worse as we age and how we can solve this problem by sweating. To do this, you first need to know that your body has countless sweat glands.
Many of them are located respectively in your armpits, in your palms, on your forearms and on the soles of your feet. When you sweat, it’s usually in response to high temperatures or emotional stress. The glands become active whenever you are nervous, anxious, or excited. To understand the positive effect of sweat, you need to know that the glands always contain fresh skin cells.
If they get into wounds, they grow firmly and help to close them. These fresh cells are formed deep down in the sweat glands and come to the surface when a wound occurs. If this works well, they heal quickly. If not, wounds disappear slowly or do not heal at all.
Wound healing slows down with age
What we do know is that wounds heal faster in young people than in older people. Michigan’s researchers have now tried to understand this process in detail. They have also investigated exactly what role the sweat glands play. Their first finding: younger people tend to sweat less than older people. But was that the answer to the riddle? Is this the reason wounds heal more slowly in older people?
Even if the answer is very simple: the researchers found out that it is the same. But the results also showed that only half of the sweat glands of the older people produced fresh skin cells that have the power to heal wounds. In young people, they found these skin cells in all sweat glands. In addition, the skin cells of the elderly did not adhere as well. This is probably another reason why their wounds heal more slowly.
The skin of the older subjects was also badly damaged by the sun, so the cells had trouble getting to where they were needed. It’s a bit like someone skipping steps when climbing stairs. Some cells made it to the top, others stumbled.
Sweating for all it’s worth
But the more people sweat, the more cells are flushed to the surface. And when more cells make their way up, more arrive at their destination. This in turn brings us back to the topic of saunas. Here, you sweat for all you’re worth. So a correspondingly large number of cells also reach the surface. Your skin can only benefit from this. Another lesson from the study is: always make sure you use the correct sunscreen. Because once the skin is damaged, its self-healing powers suffer.
