I didn't even know people used hydrogen peroxide to clean wounds...

Why would anyone do that in the first place?

My doctor said this is wrong.

Pain? What pain? It's always been completely painless for me. And you don't leave it on long, just enough to kill whatever might be hanging around the area, and then you bandage it. It's perfectly fucking fine.

I'm getting a little tired of these guys' videos and how inaccurate they can be. Especially, the ridiculous ones where they try to perform ideas they read about on the internet or wherever for making people's lives easier. One that quickly comes to mind is the one where they try "closing a cereal box in a pyramid shape." Idiot. You don't FOLD THE SIDES OF THE BOX, you fold over the sides of the BAG into a triangle before ROLLING it. This helps it stay closed tighter and better.

There have been others, but, like this one, they're just presenting their own (inaccurate) opinion. H202 is fine as long as you don't put tons on and leave it there for hours.

Yes it's a classic way to clean wounds and ForgedReality is right, it's perfectly fine so long as you don't leave it on the wound. I grew up having my scrapes and cuts cleaned with hydrogen peroxide then with good clean water seconds later before a bandage, as have millions of us.

Let's not forget to mention how incredibly diluted consumer-grade Hydrogen Peroxide is...~2-3%, so your image of dousing your open flesh to this caustic substance is missing how much is simultaneously being flushed out with common (but effective) H2O before you hit the tap.

Hmmm. I would wager that while H2O2 might not be necessary (maybe not even beneficial at all) in the large majority of cuts and scrapes, if you happen to get cut or scraped by something that happens to have some particularly nasty bacteria on it, it is probably better to attempt to kill that stuff off, even though it is also doing some damage to healthy cells also.

And the amount of damage to healthy cells might be so small that it is worth using the H2O2 most of the time just on the off chance that some particularly nasty and resistant bacteria got in there.

But to be fair, that balance (small chance of particularly nasty bacteria vs guaranteed but negligible "damage" to healthy cells) is probably close enough that there are rational arguments either direction.

And no offense to SciShow, but I think that if anyone was going to sway my opinion on this one way or the other, it should be an actual *doctor* that brings up clinical trials -- maybe a Healthcare Triage video or something...

I agree. I had a bad scrape in college that is still infected 30 years later. If someone had doused that wound with bacteria killers at the time, my body would have healed better.

What about good ol' isopropyl alcohol? Love that burn!