I'm Anton Hellman.

I'm Justin Morganstern.

And this is the journal jam podcast.

EM cases is part of Shremie, the Schwartz-Riseman Emergency Medicine Institute.

That's the nonprofit organization dedicated to improving EM care through high-quality research and education. The opinions expressed on this podcast are intended for general information and educational purposes only and should not be used to diagnose treat or prevent any medical condition, nor should they be used as a substitute for medical advice from qualified practicing physician. Unless stated otherwise, the opinions expressed by the hosts or guests are made in their individual capacity, not on behalf of the Institute nor Medicine Cases. All right, we're back with part two of our journal jam podcast on laceration and wound repair.

We listed a whole slew of questions, and we're going to go through a whole bunch of dogma

and see whether they hold for repairing lacerations in this part two. In part three,

we're going to move on to aftercare, which might actually be the most important part. We won't

give that away just yet. So in part one, we talked about how to prepare for the laceration.

We talked about sterile gloves versus non-sterole gloves.

We talked about irrigating the wound. Let's move on to the variety of materials we have to choose

from to close the skin and compare sutures versus staples versus glue versus wound closure

strips. The brand name is stare strips. And we'll look at whether it makes

any difference in outcomes, whether you use any of these materials. Now, before this podcast, I had a few

biases about this topic that I must admit to here now. So my first feeling is that based on some data from a while back, that for minor

lacerations of the hand, we probably don't need to do anything but give the patient a

band-aid or maybe some wound closure strips. So if the laceration isn't really deep or it's not

crossing a joint and it's not into a muscle or tendon, don't waste your time with sutures.

The second thing that I have to admit before we get into this is I love surgical skin glue.

I usually stretch the indications a bit for surgical skin glue to include pretty much any superficial

laceration that's not over a major joint or other area where there's a major amount of tension

where I can get good skin apposition. I combine the skin glue with wound closure strips for

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