07/08/2024   English German
  Edition # 154  
San Francisco, 07-08-2024

Top Product: Drawing Salve "Prid"
Figure [1]: "Prid" is a drawing salve to remove wooden splinters.

Michael Despite all my caution, I've managed to get a splinter more than once while working with wood. For these splinters that get under the skin and are often hard to remove, there seem to be a lot of regionally different terms. For example, in Munich, they say "Schiefer," and in Augsburg, they say "Spelten." In any case, you can try to remove the splinter with tweezers, but that doesn't always work because the piece either doesn't stick out enough or breaks off when you try to pull it out.

The next step is to use a sterilized needle to roughen the callused skin around the entry point, hoping to expose part of the splinter so you can grab its tip with tweezers. But if that doesn't work, what then? From my childhood in Germany, I remembered the so-called "drawing salve," though I recalled it more as a bit of hocus-pocus.

Figure [2]: Embedded splinters can be very painful.

One day, I felt a stubborn little splinter in my fingertip and started looking for solutions. By chance, I found a so-called "drawing salve" named "Prid" on Amazon and ordered it. When I opened the tiny tin, an interesting smell greeted me, a bouquet of liquid tar, sea buckthorn, and maybe caramel?

I applied a glob of the salve to the spot where the splinter had embedded itself, put a bandage on it, and lo and behold, the next morning, the splinter was stuck to the cushion of the bandage. A marvel of medicine! Since then, I've always kept a tin of Prid in my medicine cabinet, and it’s also a must-have on our travel list. Top product!

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