In the few times I had an infection, it heals faster than an open cut or even bruises and abrasions. Why?
IANA doctor or medical professional, but my guess is that most of what you see with a boil or something like that is the results of the body’s own attempts to fight the infection- the pus, the swelling, the redness, etc…
Get rid of the infection and the rest subsides pretty quickly, leaving the actual damage to heal, which is usually surprisingly minor and has the advantage of all that blood flow present for the inflammation, at least for a short while.
Your interpretation of healing time is biased. By the time an abscess has formed you are already deep into the infection/inflammation process. When you get a clean wound you start counting healing days from the time of injury, but when an abscess is drained you don’t typically start counting from the week or ten days prior, when the infection started. Also, a localized abscess may look dramatic but actually represent a smaller, more controlled infection than a big area of cellulitis without abscess.
With an abscess your body is already recruiting a lot of resources to the area, and the local environment is flooded with inflammatory and immune modulators; with normal wound healing the same process takes place but it must ramp up from zero at the time of injury. This takes time.
I promise that clean wounds heal faster than infected wounds of the same size.
The boil/abcess/ulcer is a hole in the dermis (no skin at all) and so the body knows to replace it with a scar… a shiny purple flesh that isn’t skin.
The abrassion,etc is injury to the epidermis, and the repair is to let the dermis below grow it out.
The defect when the purple scar tissue overgrows the normal skin , making a larger than required scar , is called a keloid scar.
In fact, once you have an abscess, it’s already almost completely healed. The body has laid siege to the infection, and completely contained and walled it off. The infection, at that point, could stay there forever, and do the rest of the body almost no harm. Unless, of course, some other injury were to damage those siege walls, and let the infection back out. Which is why it’s not recommended for amateurs to drain abscesses at home: Because the process of draining it can (not always, but it can) let some of the infection back into the body as a whole.
Dr. Pimple popper says you have to get the sac out or the abscess/ cyst will return. Getting gunk out is the easy part.