Evolution of antiseptics and wound healing from my youth

It is interesting to see how standard medicine has evolved over time. When I was a child, when I would get skin cuts or abrasions, first the area got washed in water, dried, then an antiseptic painted all over the area of the injury and nearby skin. There were three antiseptics in the medicine cabinet: there was the reddish-brown iodine, which did not hurt at all, but seemed the least effective in preventing infection; there was mercurichrome, which stung some but again not so effective in preventing infection; and there was merthiolate, that painted yellow on the skin, stung the worst but was by far the best at preventing infections - although there was some redness and swelling no matter what the antiseptic being used. So merthiolate was abundantly painted yellow all over my skin when I got cuts and scrapes. Nowadays we know that such substances get absorbed through the skin - note how many things are applied as taped-on patches nowadays - and we now know that the methyl mercury - thimerosal - of merthiolate is a not only a great antiseptic but also is a terrible neurotoxin.

I got a lot of the yellow merthiolate painted on me as a little boy - even some into high school age - and I have wondered in later years if that had something to do with my Asperger's; no one else in the family had it.

So maybe you can understand more of my delight in discovering that skin wounds, even large and deep into the flesh, if washed out clean-looking in tap water and then using the Clark-zapper's 30 KHz pulse signal nearby - in the standard 7 minutes at a time, three times separated by 20 minutes, done each day - and with the wound taped shut, would produce rapid healing in three days with no redness nor swelling ever, and heal with no scar in a week or so. And it is cheap, maybe uses a couple penny's worth of masking tape to close the wound, and a nickel's worth of electricity from the zapper's battery to produce the signal applied several times over the next few days to heal the wound. No more merthiolate for me.

But the need for iodine as a nutritional supplement is still a concern. Apparently lots of people all over the world, not just Americans, have an iodine deficiency in their diet, I have read. And that makes them especially vulnerable to the radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents, as the body grabs any iodine it can get - radioactive or not - and sends it to the thyroid, until the thyroid has enough to do its job; then the body rejects any new incoming iodine, including the radioactive kind.