Tamara Edwards – Naturopath

• Wood splitter accident
  
  I came home late one evening to my partner with what looked like rag used for cleaning his guns and a mess of electrical tape around his middle finger. He told me that he’d had an accident with the log splitter. When he took off his ‘bandage’ I could see that the finger was split right down to the very root of the nail. He didn’t want to drive to Masterton for stitches and I was too scared to even clean it, so we decided to put clay on it.  I pushed the separated nail and skin together evenly and then moulded clay around the top and bandaged it properly. In the morning the skin and the nail had started to heal back together. It looked very delicate and we thought that the nail would probably end up falling off. We clayed it up another 2 nights and it looked quite good. Despite it never being cleaned and having used a dirty rag, it never got infected. The clay cleaned the wound thoroughly and healed what normally would have required stitches. The nail never came off. The photograph shows how the wound healed through the nail. Footnote: Several months later, the nail has grown out with no visible scarring on it.