putting tea bags on cuts?

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.