WHEN we reflect on the amount of suffering a burn injury can bring, we can appreciate the reasons it is considered one of the most painful of human experiences.

It is not just the pain that irritates when mild, and excruciating when severe; disfiguring scars, debilitating disabilities, and psychological trauma also make surviving the burn as much of an ordeal as perishing from it.

But as orthomolecular physician Dr Bradford S. Weeks, the co-editor of the Burns Regenerative Medicine and Therapy monograph observed in his introduction to the history of burns medical science, ever since doctors have come to a consensus after the First World War that burns are best treated with surgical skin transplantation with subsequent scar reduction and pain control medications, they have improved their patients' chances of surviving burn injuries by leaps and bounds.

In half a century, burn treatment protocols that include the timely removal and replacement of burnt tissue with skin grafts, pain relief, infection control, and scar reduction have been improved and refined to minimise complications and increase patients' chances of survival.

If a patient sustains burns too extensive there is no viable donor site left on him to graft, there are a few types of artificial skin now available as alternatives.

So, if surviving extensive burns to 30% of a person's body was a matter of luck in the past, it had become an expected survival after the 1950s. Now, even patients who sustain deep burn injuries to 90% of their bodies can look forward to staying alive when offered timely treatment.

However, in 21st century medicine, keeping patients alive is only half the battle won, as Prof Chen YongChong, plastic surgeon and clinical director of China National Science & Technology Centre for Burns Wounds and Ulcers will tell you. The other half - helping the patient live on with minimal scarring and reduced disability - is now the challenge.

"Surgical excision and skin grafting therapies are good techniques as they could save lives, but many patients remain badly scarred and disabled," he says.

"That is why it is necessary to consider how we can make patients recover better, more efficiently."

Burning up

It was this desire to help burn patients recover with minimal pain, scarring, and disability that drove Chinese medical doctor and scientist Prof Xu RongXiang to invent and develop what proponents now say may be the next standard of care for burns treatment: burns regenerative therapy (BRT).

Prof Chen, who was in Malaysia recently to speak to local doctors about BRT, relates the story of Prof Xu's discovery.

It began in the 1970s when Prof Xu, then a young medical student going through his residency in a burns unit, witnessed his teacher changing a baby's wound dressing. As the baby wailed in pain and bled when the dressing was removed, Xu resolved to find another way to treat burn patients - a method that is more effective and easier on patients' nerve endings.

Dr Xu studied and experimented on ways to improve the wound healing process using the skin of plants, animals, and finally, humans. And as he believes that a moist environment is vital for cells to live and regenerate naturally, instead of following conventional treatment procedures that keep burn wounds dry, he developed the moist exposed burn therapy (MEBT) - a method in BRT that does the opposite: it keeps burn wounds moist.

After providing an environment that is conducive for cell and tissue regeneration, he then strived to develop a substance that will induce regeneration. Having acquired some knowledge of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) from his father, a TCM doctor, he tried to combine different Chinese herbs and remedies that have properties that aid wound healing. The result: an ointment called the moist exposed burn ointment (MEBO) that combines seven natural plant extracts suspended in a base of beeswax.

"MEBT is a treatment method where the general principle is to always keep the wound moist, and to cause no injury, no pain, and no bleeding to the patient when we treat the wound," says Prof Chen.

"We also need to keep the use of antibiotics and disinfectants minimal because it impairs cell regeneration, and in the process of killing bacteria, we might kill healthy cells in the wound too," he adds.