Don't put up with splinters! Get one of these.

[amirm]

Between woodworking, weeding, and carrying wood for our pizza oven, I wind up with so many splinters in my hands. I get them even through gloves sometimes.

And nothing is more annoying than a splinter you can't remove.

Until now, my tool of choice for removing splinters was these tiny tweezers with super sharp ends. The problem there was that you had to find the splinter first. And with my degrading eyesight and splinters that are just too tiny to be seen, I would still wind up living with the splinter for days sometimes.

So I went on Amazon searching for a better solution and found it. Here it is:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...e=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=as2

I bought two and plan to buy more so that I have them in each location in our house so that I can get rid of the pain fast!

Highly recommended.

 

[Charles E Flynn]

I had the tip of a rose thorn go right through leather gardening gloves recommended by a horticultural society. The thorn tip broke off inside my fingertip. It was removed by a dermatologist, using a biopsy punch. One of the problems with such surgery is that the old blood below the surface of the skin and the rose thorn tip are nearly the same brownish-red color. A very bright light was used in the surgery. Until the contents of the biopsy punch were removed, the doctor and I could not be certain whether we were looking at old blood, a thorn tip, or both.

After quite a bit of research online, I found gloves claimed to be resistant to needle punctures. They are expensive, but more fun than a biopsy punch:

HexArmor Hercules NSR glove 3041

 

[DSkip]

Tape does wonders, especially for a screaming child.

 

[GaryProtein]

Amir, that's a cute little device and I am sure is helpful in many instances, but what is missing is the often necessary 15c or 12d scalpel.

Charles, regarding your dermatologist using a punch to remove a splinter shows me he wasn't very experienced or proficient with splinters. That was truly using a cannon trying to kill a mosquito. As you described your splinter was the same brownish red color as the blood. Bright lights are NOT the most helpful in removing those splinters. What is very helpful is transillumination of the site, which is very easy to do on most areas of the body, especially in the hand or fingers. A small LED light probe or HeNe diode laser (about $10 these days) transilluminating the skin will easily show the location of splinters for easy, minimally invasive removal. I can't even imagine using a punch to remove a splinter. I have done numerous minimally invasive "surgical" splinter removals for friends who are into heavy woodworking and gardening and transilluminating works superbly to identify tiny foreign bodies in the skin. I'm just a periodontist, but one of my friends claims I saved him a few thousand dollars in ER fees between deep splinter removals and suturing a couple of hand wounds!

 

[Charles E Flynn]

Thank you for a most interesting follow-up. I will have to read about transillumination.

The tip of the rose thorn was vertical as one looks down on the fingertip. It was no more than 1 or 2 mm in diameter, so with the spot brightly lit, the dermatologist put a tiny mark on the spot, and then used a biopsy punch of the same diameter. I am not a surgeon, so I do not know how he could have seen what he was doing if a scalpel were used and blood obscuring the rose thorn tip became a problem.

Years ago, I was bicycle touring in Nova Scotia. I stopped at a roadside picnic table, where a family had a boy with a splinter in his finger. There was no doctor around. That was the only time the tweezers included with my Swiss army knife saved the day.

 

[GaryProtein]

Transillumination works well because the optical density of tissues is different from foreign bodies, so the foreign body is either lighter or darker (usually darker) than surrounding tissues making it easy to see.

A little local anesthesia always makes the patient happier if the object if deep.

 

[Charles E Flynn]

Thanks for the explanation about transillumination. I do not recall the dermatologist using that term. He had a very small, very bright halogen light that he used before the surgery to mark the spot.

I had a couple of small shots of novocaine in my fingertip, so I felt nothing when the biopsy punch entered.

 

[GaryProtein]

With transillumination, the light source is held against the body surface and the light is shined THROUGH the body part, not AT the body part.

 

[Charles E Flynn]

If I recall correctly, the halogen light was used both on top of and from the side of the fingertip. It was still not possible to be certain whether we were seeing blood, rose thorn tip, or both.