Why can your body stop the bleeding from a small cut over the course of a few minutes, but bruises can continue to develop and worsen over the course of a few days?
In: Biology
Same thing! the stuff that makes your blood stop coming out just sits around doing weird stuff if no blood was coming out in the first place.
Well when you get a cut the blood rushes there to clot and stop the bleeding however a bruise is damaged tissue and takes more time to heal
A bruise is from thousands of capillaries in the area breaking and releasing a little bit of blood into the surrounding tissue. The breaks in the vessels will clot of just as fast, if not faster than those from a cut. The reason it changes color/intensity over time is that the blood will pool in areas that may be easier to see through your skin, and the hemoglobin breaks down into different molecules over time that have different colors
What you’re seeing isn’t the bruise getting worse but the blood spreading out. When you get a cut say on your finger, the blood leaves your body and the wound closes. A bruise is a localized, internal bleed, so even after the capillaries close off, there’s nowhere for the blood that’s already leaked out to go, so it spreads out in the surrounding tissue until your body clears it.
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