Anal fissures, or the tearing of the skin around the anus due to injury or corrosion, should heal in just about a few days for a normal healthy person. It should be like a cut or wound that you need to treat and protect as it heals back to normal. Usually, any delay in healing can be caused by other things such as sustenance of physical damage, failure to obtain proper treatment, and/or poor hygiene. However, if the fissures are already being kept protected from further damage, treated with the right medications, and cleaned frequently, but the healing still takes longer than expected, there might be other underlying reasons for the delay.
Delays in healing and recovery indicate resistance to treatment, thus causing chronic anal fissures. This resistance can result from other conditions that affect the healing process such as existing diseases, infections, or drug habits. Here are some things that you might need to be checked for if chronic anal fissure is experienced:
- Unwanted drug interaction. Oftentimes, a person may not be as transparent as necessary to their doctors about any drug habit. Medications are usually prescribed according to a person’s specific health problem, genetic predispositions, and current medications. If a doctor is unaware of the usage of any specific drug, he may inevitably prescribe a medication that contradicts with the current drug’s actions. This is especially true for people who feel shame in revealing any unhealthy lifestyle habits like smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, or taking illicit drugs.
If you suspect that your medications are being contradicted by your existing lifestyle habits, it would be better to talk about it with your doctor. However, if you still decide to keep it to yourself, you might as well just try avoiding the habit while you heal and recover from the fissures. For example, you can try to quit smoking weed, or at least stop temporarily, if you think that it is causing your antibiotics not to work or is making you sweat more so your topical cream does not stick to your skin.
- Inflammatory bowel diseases. Chronic fissures may occur if a person has an inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. This kind of disease causes chronic inflammation of most of the digestive tract including the rectum and anus. The fissures may not heal quickly if the inflammation does not wear off or kept under control.
- Genital infections. The genitals are the external organs most proximal to the anus, so any existing genital infection may directly affect or cause the fissures. An example of this is bacterial vaginosis with fungal infection. If untreated, the infection around the genitals can spread along the perianal area and cause the skin to itch, crack and corrode.
- Immunosuppressive diseases. A good example o is AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) caused by HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). Delayed healing and recurrent infections are key symptoms of this disease due to the body’s impaired immune processes. In immunosuppressive diseases, a person’s body cannot fight off infection-causing microbes so any existing wound or cut may not heal properly. This is a serious condition that needs to be ruled out with the doctor if a person experiences non-healing of any wounds other than the anal fissures.
- Complicated chronic diseases. Chronic diseases like Diabetes Mellitus can cause healing delays when the condition is uncontrolled and complications arise. Proper wound healing is found to be difficult when the sugar levels in the blood are constantly elevated because the sugar that reaches the surface of the wound nourishes the bacteria that gnaw away the skin around the wound.
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