https://paulnystrom.com/tags/easy/Recent content in Easy on Paul NystromHugoen-usSat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://paulnystrom.com/posts/suture-removal/Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://paulnystrom.com/posts/suture-removal/<p>Suture removal is not complicated. The vast majority of sutures (aka stitches) placed in the ER are done with a technique called simple interrupted. What that means is that each stitch has a single knot: it goes into the wound on one side, comes out on the other, and is tied with a knot.</p> <p>Doctors learn to suture midway through medical school. In my experience, nothing has changed about this in the last 25 years. The standard advice is to tell patients to return for suture removal in the clinic or the ER. For things on the face, it&rsquo;s usually recommended to have those out in 5 days. If they stay in longer, you tend to get scarring where the actual suture was—so besides the laceration scar, you may have little dots on either side of the scar from where the suture was. Things on other parts of the body are often removed at 7 to 10 days. Sometimes with a laceration over a joint or somewhere that is very mobile, the sutures should stay in 10 to 14 days. But this is not an exact science.</p>