Why don't doctors ever lance simple abscesses?
And why do they so often misuse the knife for other purposes? From the "professional" version of the Merck Manual perhaps intended for treating professionals rather than "consumers" who are only afforded "poor man's health care" in any case.
Procedures for removing a fishhook embedded in the skin are mentioned on the same page. Fishermen or hunters or other outdoorsmen would not hesitate to incise and drain infectious abscesses of any sort on the human body or set and splint broken bones, etc. The Vitamin D from exposure to sunlight outdoors is essential to the healing of minor wounds typically incurred from outdoors activities.
The example of removing a fishhook proves the necessity of lancing an abscess by yourself without professional assistance in some situations.
Seal finger
"Seal" finger, sometimes called "spekkfinger" or "blekkfinger" in Norwegian, is very likely to occur from getting a fishhook stuck in your skin, or perhaps scraping your knuckle on the deck of a dirty fishing boat. The exact species of "seal" or shark or fish or crab or oyster or mussel is largely irrelevant. And whether it's your finger or elbow or shin or foot etc.
The "Can(adian) J(ournal of) Plast(ic) Surg(ery)" is raising red flags. Back to my favorite term "blekkfinger" for the same condition. We're in the realm of makeup and plastic surgery, silicone breast, lip and butt implants, not honesty and real beauty here, so let's just say a patient walks into the doctor's office with a hand self-injected with ink and silicone to swell it up and make it look black and blue and deeply infected for a disability claim on a commercial fishing boat. The doctor has no choice but to bill the disability on the claim, or else the clinic is out the money. What kind of a clinic is it? There far are too many strip mall outpatient clinics and expensive hospital-based practices anyways.
Okay, seal blubber is not exactly silicone, but it will definitely have a similar effect if injected, as any specialist in plastic surgery ought to know.
A S Baker
Some of these infections just need to be soaked in hot water, perhaps with epsom salts or just salty seawater, and they are not necessary to lance unless an actual pustule full of fluid forms, and even then, barely a nick or a prick or a scratch is often enough to drain it.
Antibiotics have been oversold as a false promise of curing all bacterial infections. They are not and never have been a cure-all, and out in the wilderness or at sea, infections need to be treated without them. People are being overdoctored for every little bump and scrape.
Until about 30 years ago, amputation of the offending finger was the accepted cure for a disease called spekk-finger (blubber-finger), by Norwegian sealers. In Alaska and elsewhere, the disease is called sealer's finger or seal finger. ¶Seal finger occurs only among those who handle seals. According to medical doctors Elizabeth F. Elsner and James R. Crook, of the University of Alaska, the exact nature of the infectious agent is unknown. Doctors have conjectured that a bacteria is involved, but the specific organism has not been isolated.
University crooks and mobsters are making artificial limbs again. There's no accredited medical school and never has been at the University of Alaska. They're animal lovers and ecoterrorists demanding that you have your finger amputated as punishment for hunting their beloved seals, or if you broke any of their harshly interpreted state fishing regulations.
Matthew J. Streitz
A soft tissue abscess may require incision and drainage. … Most abscesses should be drained (1). …
Deep bone abscesses
If it's not a "soft tissue abscess" as described in the article, it must be a deep bone abscess.
Jawbone and maxillary sinus abscesses are typically treated by removing the patient's teeth and allowing the abscess to continue festering in the bone. Dentists will not puncture or incise an abscess under any circumstances. They merely perform cosmetic work over it if they can't justify removing teeth. And if you aren't a professional singer of the correct political party, you probably don't need an ear-nose-and-throat specialist either.
(The diagram is too sketchy. It's not even possible to get a funky bone infection at the location indicated on the front inside of the spine away from the back, and there's nothing there to justify letting a doctor loose with a knife so close to the spine or spinal cord. That's thousands and thousands of dollars for a thirty-minute MRI.)
No, no, no! A deep festering abscess is an excellent source of income for a family doctor if left hidden and untreated, and it would be very cruel to incise it or let it drain out, and thereby deprive a brother doctor in the trade of his income from the frequent office visits necessitated and other drugs that might be prescribed.
"Hyperbaric oxygen therapy" is an exceedingly dangerous last ditch effort if it's even honorable to keep a Nazi-style "gas chamber" of any sort in a hospital. (Deep divers or underwater basket-weavers with "the bends" etc.?) Instead the patient if ambulatory or able to move at all should be encouraged to obtain aerobic exercise to stimulate natural blood flow, oxygen permeation and continued production of red blood cells as well as white in the bone marrow. Furthermore, doctors are far too quick to amputate the whole limb rather than cut or drill into a bone abscess to let it drain out.
Any application of "heat" deep into the bone to treat or help draw out an infection would necessarily involve ionizing radiation as for cancer. Ordinary antibiotics do not seem penetrate or have much effect deep in the bone either. Certain petroleum or wood tar or creosote compounds can act as some chemotherapy, too, some of the very same chemicals that are notorious for causing cancer.
However, if an "infection" is resistant to antibiotics and resolves when radiation and chemotherapy are applied, it is entirely possible that it could have been cancerous (or viral) all along and not bacterial or fungal. Athlete's foot, ringworm, cradle cap, common yeast infections etc. all occur on the surface outside the human body and I am very suspicious if fungal infections are claimed to penetrate much if at all inside the body. Living animal tissue is just not very hospitable for most fungi. Bone marrow is also the center of the immune system where any bacterial infections should be most aggressively and effectively fought off naturally. Viral infections in the bone? Aches and pains reported by narcotics-seeking addicts?
Cancers come and go unnoticed most of the time in the human body, and almost all thorough autopsies of people who died of unrelated causes will find cancerous tumors.