Bone wax is used to help mechanically control bleeding from bone surfaces during surgical procedures.
It is made of beeswax with a softening agent such as paraffin or vasoline and is smeared across the bleeding edge of the bone, blocking the holes and causing immediate bone hemostasis through a tamponade effect. Bone wax is supplied in sterile sticks, and most often requires softening before it can be applied.
The FDA has recently approved a new water soluble bone hemostasis material called Ostene, which is designed to look and feel like bone wax.[1] This material comprises a sterile mixture of water-soluble alkylene oxide copolymers, derived from ethylene oxide and propylene oxide. These copolymers have a long history in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, and they are considered inert. These compounds are not metabolized, but eliminated from the body unchanged. It is anticipated that with the introduction of these new hemostatic materials, the incidence of surgical bone infections, nonunion and inflammatory complications will decrease with time.