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Beneficial use for white flour
Every day I am inundated by shared e-mail. I get political comments, pictures of cute animals, stories that make me cry, and helpful hints. I am amazed at how much false information is in these e-mails. I often do a little google search and find that the facts are flat out wrong or deliberately misleading. I don’t know who originates these things, but most of them are in the same writing style and they are all way too wordy.
I got one a few weeks ago. It was a long, long, long story about someone’s friend who served in Vietnam, a burn victim, and a kitchen accident. The bottom line was that if you put white flour on a burn, it will not blister or scar. I wondered if it was true.
Last week I was cooking up a storm. I had all four burners going on high heat. I reached to stir something on the back burner and bumped the lid of the pot on the front burner. Steam hit my hand - immediate pain and redness on two fingers. I was reaching for an ice cube, when I thought of the flour e-mail.
I didn’t have any white flour in the kitchen, but I had spelt flour. I rubbed flour into both burns. I went back to cooking, still in pain. “That didn’t work,” I thought cynically. I didn’t think about the incident again until this morning. I looked at my hands…no redness, no brown mark. Both of those steam burns would normally have blistered. They did not. In fact, I have no memory of any more pain. I finished cooking and served the meal, never thinking again about pain or burns.
So, surprise, here on the BTD website, is a beneficial use for white wheat flour. Rub it on burns. If you are Type O or a non secretor of any Type, keep it in your first aid kit, but out of your food.
The flour story originated with a burn victim in Vietnam. My Honorable Husband spent a year in Vietnam serving our country. His cousin, Mark, died there in 1972. On this Memorial Day, take a moment to thank God for young men and young women down the years who have volunteered to give up their freedoms to preserve ours.
4 comments

http://www.snopes.com/medical/homecure/flourburns.asp
Here's some advice from the professionals:
http://www.sja.org.uk/sja/first-aid-advice/effects-of-heat-and-cold/burns-and-scalds.aspx

The problem is that I have tried everything the Snopes article and your first aid site recommend, and it does not work for me. I feel about cold water and ice for burns the same way I feel about certain herbal remedies - if they work for you, great, but they don't work for me.
I remembered the flour remedy and tried it. I was totally surprised when it worked. I will keep using it on small kitchen burns.
However - you make an excellent point. If I was dealing with a severe burn - going deep into the flesh or covering a large area, I would immerse it in ice water and call for an ambulance. I would not recommend putting flour on someone who had been pulled out of a burning building.
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