Do you grit your teeth and yank, or try to peel gently? Either way, there seems to be no pain-free way of removing a sticking plaster, which is apt to bring hairs and who knows what else with it. But whereas the trauma is trivial for a grazed knee, removing medical adhesives can be a serious problem in other circumstances, particularly when they are applied to the skin of premature babies (which lack an epidermis) or elderly people (where the skin is thinned and poorly anchored). Wound dressing and attachment of medical devices in such cases is therefore fraught with difficulty and danger.
Approaches that weaken the skin/adhesive interface might lessen the damage to skin only at the expense of making attachment less secure. More sophisticated release procedures could make removal impractically slow in a medical setting. Laulicht et al. now offer another solution: to decouple attachment and detachment. They have devised a medical tape that is 'removed' by stripping off the backing layer while leaving the adhesive itself in place on the skin (B. Laulicht, R. Langer and J. M. Karp, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USAhttp://doi.org/jpw; 2012). The backing can be peeled off with a relatively low force, while retaining a high shear strength so that the tape won't easily be pulled away inadvertently.
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