system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does salt and alcohol hurt open wounds?
gpt
When you have an open wound, you have exposed nerve endings. The signals that nerve ending send are chemical in nature. So when you introduce a high concentration of sodium ions (in the case of salt) you cause those nerve endings to misfire and send a signal of pain when there salt itself is not causing much damage at all. For alcohol it's the Ethanol that causes pain because we have little nodes called vanilloid receptors that detect heat so we dont burn ourselves. The Ethanol activates the vanilloid receptor and sends a misfired message to the brain that you're experiencing pain.