What is a chronic wound? What changes must happen within a wound for clinicians to classify it as “chronic”? Is there a time frame for healing chronic wounds? And what should we clinicians do to prevent and/or reverse chronic wounds? These are all great questions that keep us on our toes, from the dedicated seasoned clinician to the clinicians new to our field. In this blog I will define what a chronic wound is, what it consists of, and whether there is a way to convert or reverse a wound.
By definition, a chronic wound is a wound that has “failed to proceed through an orderly and timely process to produce anatomical and functional integrity, or proceeded through the repair process without establishing, a sustained anatomic and functional result.”1 In layman’s terms, a chronic wound is a wound that does not proceed through the four phases of wound healing in an orderly fashion and decides to make one too many pit stops through the journey …
