How to Treat a Sunburn
Spending too much time in the sun can lead to some pain – especially if you didn’t wear any sunscreen. When you get a sunburn you want to make sure to take the proper steps to treat it and help it heal. Kim Dewing is a physician assistant with Avera and explains what action you should take if you get a sun burn.
What is a sunburn?
A sunburn is a radiation burn from the UV rays from the sun, so what happens is the UV rays contact our skin and they start to damage the skin cells and specifically can even change the DNA in your skin cells. When your skin cells get too much radiation from the UV rays, they'll hit this threshold level and they start to die off.
How does your body repair the damage to your skin?
That triggers your body's natural immune system to come in and try to repair the damage. So what happens is the blood vessels dilate to allow more blood to the area, more fluid to the area, to bring all the healthy cells in to come repair damage and what you will see is the redness, the inflammation and the swelling. When you see a sunburn happening, you know what your body's immune system is really trying to protect that skin. And then as the dead skin cells start to slough off, you'll notice the peeling on the skin as well and eventually the sunburn will heal. But the scary part of a sunburn, some of those skin cells that have had DNA damage, they escape that repair process and have a chance to become skin cancer down the road.
Types of sunburns
We talk about first degree sunburn, that's when it just affects the top layer of your skin, the epidermis. If it's just in the top layer, it will about about 3 to 7 days to heal. If it goes into the second layer of skin, or the dermis, that is called a second degree burn, and that's when you will see blistering from your sunburn. That can take about ten days or a few weeks to heal.
Treating a sunburn
If you're starting to notice some burning, you can just feel it getting hot or people are starting to notice your skin is getting pink, you're already at that point where you're going to have a burn. So most important is to get the skin covered and get out of the sun and then to cool it down as quickly as you can using a cool washcloth or a cool compress. Taking short, cool showers several times over the next few days will be helpful and applying a lot of moisturizer. We like over the counter CeraVe moisturizing cream and putting that on over the next few days. And then staying very hydrated is also important. The body takes all the fluid to the area of the sunburn to try to repair it quickly, so you'll get dehydrated during those days that you have a sunburn. Drinking plenty of fluids is important.
