Sutures or Superglue? What Can You Really Get Away With?

Can Superglue Really Replace Sutures? Give Us Two Minutes and We'll Settle the Question!

Topics in Survival Medicine

Our Series on Building Perfect Medical Kits

Rarely does something useful emerge from war. But in the case of superglue... it did.

Our story begins with those airborne cowboys of WWII. You know the ones. Barely out of high school and still thin enough to squeeze into the cockpit of a flying sports car. Their planes going by names like "Marine Corsair" and "P-51 Mustang," these pilots signed up for a crash course in adulthood. Along the way, they quite literally embodied their experiences, and later carried them into their civilian lives.

Found By Mistake

During WW II, pilots often had broken shards of their clear acrylic canopy implant in their arms and face. This shrapnel was produced when bullets tore through their Plexiglas-like cockpits. In time, most flyers completely forgot about these foreign bodies. The pieces of embedded acrylic never seemed to cause problems, so they went unnoticed, and were almost never removed.

It Was All a Lucky Accident

Years later during routine physicals and imaging studies (X-rays), physicians at the Veterans Administration noticed the fragments, and noted they weren't dissolving or festering out. This was unusual. It seemed the body wasn't reacting to them at all.

The finding paved the way for using acrylic based adhesives to close small and medium sized wounds. Reasoning that if solid acrylics weren't causing an immune response, perhaps its liquid form wouldn't either. They were correct, and the rest is history.

Dermabond is ‎2-Octyl cyanoacrylate - Superglue is Ethyl cyanoacrylate

Superglue is very similar in molecular structure to surgical adhesives, and you can use it as an alternative to suturing. If the wound you're closing has minimal tension on the edges when you pinch them together, and you can keep the superglue from filling in the would with a blob of glue, then it can be used in place of stitches - almost regardless of the wounds length.

The trick to remember is to keep the superglue topical, and don't use any adhesive if the wound edges don't come together easily. In that instance, superglue or Dermabond is unlikely to hold, and sutures will be necessary to prevent the laceration from pulling apart later.

Maybe that was longer than two minutes, but we hope you found it useful. Sutures are not always needed. Often you can get by with Dermabond or superglue. Dermabond is available on the web, and its applicator is easy to use. Superglue can be found almost anywhere, though its thin nozzle can make it difficult to apply.

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