Recent burns of the hand. Early excision-graft versus conventional treatment. A retrospective study during two years.

Early excision-graft of burned hands seems to have totally superseded the conventional method of progressive detorsion often with late grafting. Does this treatment merit acceptance under these conditions? Do the theoretical advantages of aggressive methods counter-balance the primary difficulty of diagnosing the initial depth of burn? Are these fewer difficulties and risks in early excision-graft than in the slower methods? Can we ascribe the failure of conventional method to a poor technical realisation? Following a short summary of the principles of the two methods, we attempt to answer these questions by a retrospective study comparing identical series of patients. We have begun a prospective randomized trial and present the preliminary results here.