No leash ,no trunks,no wettie(what the heck are you DOING out in public ???)
Here in Cali. there’s usually loads of kelp around…I bet that would make a nice turnnie.
True…but would a knot hold in kelp? Slippery stuff. Besides, anybody who’s going that far on the ‘back to nature’ riff - y’know, they’d prolly welcome a chance to be part of the food chain.
A turnnie can cause some major probs…I was taught 15min. max on a turnnie…but that might have changed by now.
That’s what they taught me too - best to loosen it some now and again so you don’t kill the limb. And like you mentioned, major arteries are gonna be a problem.
Really, that’s why this quikclot stuff struck me as something good. Especially for something like what got this guy, major wounds that , say, one direct pressure ( or pinching off the artery at a pressure point ) really wouldn’t do much for. Best of all, it’s something that’s unlikely to do any real harm if it was used in a situation where it wasn’t really called for.
As Ryan mentioned and Herb alludes to - a tourniquet is a Last Resort, when maybe losing the limb is figured against almost certainly losing the victim. You hear how starting CPR immediately is good, on account of how a very few minutes without oxygen makes your brain damaged? Think of how it’d affect meat. And nerve tissue. That’s what these things do.
For that matter, a longer quote, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_bleeding_control#Tourniquet :
Another method of achieving constriction of the supplying artery is via the use of a tourniquet - a tightly tied band which goes around a limb to restrict blood flow. Tourniquets are routinely used in order to bring veins to the surface for cannulation, although their use in emergency medicine is more limited, and is restricted in most countries (with France being a notable exception) to professionals such as physicians and paramedics, as this is often considered beyond the reach of first aid and those acting in good faith as a good samaritan. A key exception is the military, where many armies carry a tourniquet as part of their personal first aid kit. Most Police in Australia are also authorised to apply a tourniquet to bleeding victims, which is often the case if they arrive onsite before ambulance personnel do. This is reflective of the higher chance of receiving massive trauma (such as amputation) and the increased time involved in reaching definitive care.
Improvised tourniquets, however, usually fail to achieve force enough to compress the arteries of the limb and thus do not only fail to stop arterial bleeding but actually increase bleeding due to the impaired venous bloodflow. Some argue that tourniquets should never be used in the pre-hospital setting, not even for amputations. Evidence from mine-infested areas also show a higher mortality for mine victims treated with tourniquets pre-hospital. An emergency tourniquet should in any case never be applied to the forearm or lower leg since the arteries in these locations run between bones and can not be compressed.
(Italics mine) I’ll also note that there was a time ( late '40s, early '50s?) when there were a lot of them used, mostly when they didn’t need to be. Which meant some people lost limbs that they didn’t have to lose.
Amputation-TraumaticAlso, from the NIH, an article on is interesting in respect to this.
But to get back to basics;
There’s not enough of this info. out in the general public and it needs to be.
Absolutely! And there’s lots of first aid courses out there, I can’t reccommend 'em too strongly. And after all, the life ya save might be mine.
Doc’s King here,
Not at all, I just put in a little time as a fireman and tried to keep up with it all. On the other hand, you’ve had to do it for-real…
doc…