Sports Girls Play has a good post – Tips for Dealing with Gymnast’s Hand Rips.
Great content, as always.
But it mentions using tea bags to “reduce the pain and speed the healing of the rip“.
This was common with War wounds decades ago, especially when medics had nothing else.
Some tea (green and black) has tannin, not tanic acid.
The two terms are often confused. There’s a clarification on Wiki Answers.
My question to the great gymnastics blog-o-sphere:
Does tannin from a wet tea bag actually do anything for a gymnasts hand rip?
Does it reduce pain?
Does it speed healing?
Or is this another “gym legend”? … A useful placebo?
Five minutes exhaustive research on the WWW couldn’t answer this question conclusively.
14 comments ↓
Even though it’s been 18 years since I quit gymnastics, I still remember (a) how originally skeptical I was about tea bags on rips, and (b) how shocked I was when it worked as well as it did. It definitely reduced the pain and toughened the spot up for the next day; combined with sleeping with the rip slathered in vaseline and covered by a sock, I was almost always completely ready to go the next day.
In order to reduce confusion, it’s best just to keep a box of plain Lipton tea bags around– cheap, and you don’t have to wonder if that random box of “Lavender Sleepy Time” tea (or whatever) you’ve got hanging around will do the trick.
Most of the research on the use of tea bags to control pain has been done on breast feeding mothers and the pain that occurs on sensitive skin. Aside from a few ill-designed studies, it has been found that the application of warm, wet tea bags does decrease pain better than the use of no aide but does not have a significant difference than any other pain decreasing treatment (creams, warm compresses, etc). So yes, it has been proven to work but if you have something else laying around that works for you don’t go spending money (not that tea is overly expensive).
So everyone is a little bit correct here. Tannic Acid is actually a commercially used type of Tannin which is also a polyphenol. The process off putting a teabag containing either of these natural/commercially formed chemicals is that they act as an astringent and induce the cell layer to shrink and therefore stick to one another. It also aids in providing a mild coaggulation response (which is the process the body goes through to form a scab/stop bleeding). By inducing the coaggulation response, the wound now has a tougher outside/natural band-daid as opposed to the tender wound that leaves pain receptors/nerves open to the environment.
I played soccer growing up and there is a rule that if you have visible blood, you’re off the field. Anytime we got hit in the mouth, split our lip, etc, the coach would give us a teabag to suck on to stop the bleeding. It definitely worked for that, but running around with a teabag inside your cheeks is not something that I would recommend.
Not sure about skin rips, but I was told to use teabags to aid clotting when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. It definitely helped, both with pain and with healing.
Since I was small, I’ve always used tea on my eyes when I’ve had eye infections, equally I was told to use it on my rabbits eye infections to clean the eyes up.I guess it’s to do with the anti oxidants in the tea that it’s good for skin.
tannin is known to cause cancer when you drink it. it’s in tea and wine. i guess be careful using it on cuts all the time.
Teabag worked well for an abscess tooth I had.
tea bags definitely worked well for my rips. They stop bleeding, help form a protective covering over the wound, and reduce pain.
Rick, self experiment by ripping both hands and using a teabag on only one. Repeat several times for good statistics.
Off topic but related: I remember being told when I was younger the addition of squeezing vitamin E onto a rip. Any merit to the practice?
My gymnasts like vitamin E but it can be expensive. When my rec kid I tell them that medicated Chapstick. That is much cheaper and if they lose at school, no biggie!
Vitamin E is great, but the word on my end of the street has always been Preparation H!
everytime i get a rip, i put a tea bag on my hand and tape it down. that way i can wear it all night when i am sleeping. it works for me and my teammates. my coach tells us to do it everytime. he says it dries it out which makes it less painfull. (old chinese custom)
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