First cans now bagels

I'll bet that knife is dull. A very sharp knife causes far fewer accidents.

You would lose...

You would lose...

Um, no. That's an old wives tale. If you've got your finger in the way, you're going to get cut, sharp knife or dull. The only exception is a knife so dull it slips off the carrot (or whatever). The OP didn't say the knife slipped off the carrot (although he didn't say the opposite, either). Any knife sharp enough to prep a bunch of carrots is not likely to slip off the very last one.

Professional cooks, who keep their knives scary sharp, get cut far more often than they admit, especially if they're cooking with wine :)

-Frank

Very nice work! But, using a dull knife, the operator then applies more and more force, then when the resistance is overcome there is less control. I stand by my statement!

"Fact" of Myth #14:

Sparks produced during sharpening mean the knife is being damaged. The sparks are actually bits of red-hot, overheated metal coming off the knife. They indicate that the grinding wheel is seriously overheating the knife-edge, which detempers (weakens) it.

I don't think that I buy this: just because the torn-off bits are red hot doesn't mean that the edge is too hot. Annealing ("detemper-ing") requires a red hot edge. Now the edge is very thin so it *could* get red hot while just behind it doesn't, but I'm still skeptical.

Harold?

Bob

I agree but try to tell my sister-in-law that. :-) I use to sharpen her kitchen knives when we went to visit but so much hassel over it I quit. ...lew...

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 10:20:27 -0500, the infamous "Buerste" scrawled the following:

True, usually.

I had just sharpened Mom's kitchen knife and was dicing up some meat for stew when I hit a piece of supremely tough gristle. It pulled my thumb into the line of fire and, before I knew it, the blade had cut halfway through my thumbtip and nail, stopping on the distal phalanx. I'd have lost my thumbtip had that bone not been in there. Whew!

Mom screamed when I said "Aw, shit.", but I just walked over to the sink, cleaned the wound, dried it, applied some Bacitracin and a bandaid, and got back to work. A hospital probably would have given me a dozen stitches, but it healed on its own (with the butterfly bandage) in a couple weeks with minimal fuss and pain. ERs are highly overrated.

The blood (+ soap and warm water) cleansed the wound, the Bacitracin prevented infection, and the clean cut allowed the skin to reattach to itself without stitches, without any scarring, and without very much pain at all. I was very happy about all 3. Which reminds me to grab a little bottle of Povidone the next chance I get. It's a very good cleanser/microbicide, too.

-- Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost. -- Thomas J. Watson

Reminds me of a study/trial that I read about treating wounds in 3rd world countries. The study was done in Haiti, IIRC.

In the trial, a hospital compared traditional suturing of wounds with the use of butterfly bandages to close them. There were some pretty serious cuts: as much as 1 cm deep and as much as 10 cm long, IIRC. The prep was the same for both treatments. I.e., they just didn't slap the butterflies on.

The butterflies did just as well as suturing. Which was great news for them, since in the 3rd world, suturing has a considerable cost: the use of a local anesthetic and an MD to do it.

Still, if I ever do another partial amputation of a finger, I'm going to let the ER handle it .

Bob

I had to buy some Betadine surgical scrub (the sudsy version) a few years ago, and was amazed at the cost for a little 6 oz bottle. Early this year, I bought a full gallon (of the Betadine brand, no less) from a veterinary supply place (Kentucky Horse Store, or something like that) for 25 bucks, shipping included. It's more than a lifetime supply for me. I prefer it over anything else for cleansing a wound before dressing it.

Also, an earlier poster mentioned bacitracin. I always used generic Neosporin, usually to good effect, but it didn't work too well on burns. Our plant nurse told me that bacitracin by itself is best for burns, because one of the other antibiotics in Neosporin actually impedes the healing of burns. Worked for me.

Joe

On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:00:26 -0500, the infamous Joe scrawled the following:

With a 2 year shelf life, it's not quite a lifetime supply, unless you know something we don't, Joe.

I'll have to remember that. I usually use a triple antibiotic.

-- To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

I've concluded that *everything* has to have an expiration date, even if it's just to force you to buy more. After 5+ years, some older stuff still works well enough to be indistinguishable from new product. I suppose eventually the povidone iodine breaks down, but I haven't seen it happen yet. OTOH, just last week we cleaned out an area of the attic to allow access for installing a new HVAC system and I found a bottle of iodine xtals that I've had since the late 60s; nearly all of it was gone - sublimated through the tightly sealed cap & all. Nothing is forever, I guess - even diamonds revert to regular carbon after a long enough time.

Joe