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June 7, 2019 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
18:46
Combat medicine GEAR recommendations that can save your life
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Wanted to give you more of a download of combat medicine type of wisdom and things that can help save lives.
Maybe your own life, right?
Maybe the life of a loved one.
Because of course, just a little background, I do a lot of different types of training and go to different instructors and I learn different things.
And recently I was able to connect with an instructor who was part of an attachment to the 82nd Airborne.
I deployed in Europe and then later in the Middle East and later served with SWAT. Him, not me.
I've never been a member of law enforcement or military myself, but I learned from a lot of people who have done that.
And so just sharing with you a couple of big aha things that I've learned from this most recent round of training.
And there's also a related podcast to this where I talk about tourniquets and I talk about The best carry gear for tourniquets.
I just want to reinforce, there's a company called Filster.
And I think it's spelled P-H-L-S-T-E-R. I think it's just Philster.com, but there's no I in Philster.
So they make some good gear.
You might want to check them out.
I haven't purchased any of their gear yet, but I plan to.
It keeps getting recommended to me by some of the other people that I'm working with.
So I'm going to check that out and I'll bring you some gear reviews later on.
But number one, big aha from all this is that You're going to need a lot more gear than you think.
And you might carry around, let's say one tourniquet, one little personal first aid kit, or what's called an IFAC, an individual first aid kit.
That's what they call it, an IFAC. Well, your IFAC is only good For one wound on one person, typically.
Maybe you've got some gauze.
Maybe you've got some blood stop.
Maybe you've got a bandage that you can stuff into a wound or something, and maybe you've got a tourniquet.
Well, again, that's only good for typically one, maybe a couple of wounds on one person.
What happens if you come up on the scene of a car wreck or you're in a car accident and you've got multiple injuries inside the car?
And also, just as a side note, what if you're trapped in the seatbelt in your car?
Because this actually happened, what I'm about to describe, this scenario.
We were running a scenario of an armed patrol evacuating a wounded person.
And one of my buddies was trying to get some gauze out to pack a wound.
And this was a brand new package.
A lot of these gauze products are packed really well in kind of vacuum-packed Mylar packages.
And quite literally, he could not open the package.
I saw him trying two or three times.
Well, I always carry a little SOG mini knife on my administrative pouch on the front of my right hip.
So on my carry belt, and by the way, you can see a video that demonstrates, it's a video tour of the Health Rangers battle belt is what it's called.
You can go to brighteon.com right now and take a look at that battle belt.
You can see my personal setup, my rig.
Might not be the best thing for your situation, but it's a rig that I run.
For self-defense and survival.
And as part of that rig, I have a mini SOG knife.
It's got, I think, an inch and a quarter blade.
Just got a finger hole in it.
Actually, it's got two finger holes.
And I have it strapped to the front of my admin pouch on my front right hip.
Like front right pelvis, you might say.
And the reason I have it there was demonstrated by exactly what happened in this scenario where this buddy of mine was trying to open this Gauze package so he could pack the wounds.
And there were some other people doing security cover with AR rifles.
So we were behind some concealment.
We were working on the wounded guy.
But again, he couldn't open the dang package.
So I pull out the SOG knife and I slit open the package with the SOG. And then he gets the gauze out and goes ahead and works on the wound.
It's important that you have a small knife that That's in the front of whatever you have going on, whatever you're carrying, your EDC, your battle belt, whatever.
You got to have a small knife accessible in the front.
The reason is because if you're working on somebody, somebody's laying on the ground.
So you are typically on your knees sort of bending over this person.
You're on your knees or you're squatted down yourself.
And when you're on your knees or squatted, It might make it a little more difficult to get to other equipment that's not readily available right where your hands are in your working area.
So if you're doing first aid on somebody, what's your working area?
Your knees are, let's say, right up against the side of this person's body, the side of their torso or the side of their hips, typically.
And you're working on tourniquets, you're packing wounds, you are right there.
Your working space is the space between your torso and their body, and it's a very limited space.
So you can't have big-ass combat knives in that space, unwieldy things that you're trying to work with.
You need to have small tools.
I also saw another guy had a seatbelt cutter tool.
Kind of a steel seatbelt cutter that you can, you know, it slices clothing off and it also slices seatbelts.
And I think that's a very valuable tool.
Sometimes you're working on somebody who's wounded and they're bleeding.
You see a lot of blood.
But in order to find the hole or to work on the hole, you have to remove some clothing.
All of you who are EMTs and medics and so on, you already know all of this, but to those listening who don't have any experience in this, you know, that's a thought maybe you hadn't really gone over.
Like, oh yeah, I'm going to have to cut the clothes off this guy.
Yeah, not only that, sometimes you have to cut their shoes off.
Sometimes you have to cut a belt off somebody.
You may have to cut all kinds of stuff off this person.
You may have to cut their seatbelt.
To get them out or just to be able to access what's going on with that person.
Like maybe they got an injury in their back.
You know, something pierced through their car seat or something.
You got to slit the seatbelt so you can lean them forward a little bit and you can run your fingers across their back and you can look for blood.
You can look for holes.
You can find out what's going on.
So you need to have the right tools.
And I think one thing I'm going to add to my kit is a seatbelt cutter.
It's a solid piece of steel.
I didn't quite catch from the guy who had this what brand it was, but I'll find out.
We'll add it to our gear reviews and do some seatbelt cutters, things like that.
You know, I have a sog knife, which could also cut seatbelts, of course, but it's more dangerous to cut clothing off somebody with a regular pointy knife, obviously, than with a seatbelt cutter, which has a rounded safety tip.
Because if you take a regular knife that's got a sharp point and a sharp edge and you start trying to cut clothes off people, you can very easily accidentally just start stabbing holes in that dude's, you know, chest or torso or whatever if you don't know what you're doing.
Especially if that person's unconscious, they're not reacting to what you're doing.
So you're not getting any screams or feedback or anything like that.
So it is important.
To have the right gear.
Now, I carry trauma shears, and trauma shears, of course, have a rounded front tip, and trauma shears can be used to cut clothing off people, and that's one of their primary uses.
However, trauma shears, the way they're set up, you don't have as much cutting leverage if you're left-handed the way you're using them.
And also, trauma shears...
You don't have as much leverage because it's just your grip strength versus if you have a seatbelt cutter, you can just latch that onto whatever you're trying to cut and you can pull that sucker with your entire You know, torso weight and momentum almost if you want to.
You know, you're just going to rip whatever is in the way, but you're not going to cut the skin of the patient because obviously the blade is hidden inside the curved, you know, the inner mechanism of the seatbelt cutter.
So there's a lot of little gear.
That comes in very handy when it comes to first aid and trauma, you know, stop the bleeding type of applications.
A lot of little pieces of gear and you can put a surprising number of these things in like what I have an administrative pouch.
I like the Maxpedition administrative pouch on the front of my belt.
Or, you know, some people carry a pouch, like a fanny pack pouch, in front, like over their crotch junk.
They have a pouch there.
They've got all kinds of gauze and gear and that.
And then other people wear an ankle rig.
And in the ankle rig, they've got compression bandages, they've got a tourniquet.
One guy that I saw had a little pen light and actually a Sharpie marker, a mini Sharpie marker, so that he could write down the time that the tourniquet was placed on you, or whoever it's placed on.
And just so you know, tourniquets, when you apply a tourniquet to somebody, it is important to note the time.
Because tourniquets...
If they're left on too long, it will become an amputation of sorts.
You'll start having serious tissue damage from lack of blood flow.
The idea of a tourniquet is to stop the blood flow right now, keep this person alive, keep their blood pumping so you can get them to an emergency trauma center.
Where there, at the trauma center, they can then suture up the arteries or deal with the tissue damage.
Whatever needs to be done.
Your job is to just keep the blood from gushing out, basically, is all we're talking about here.
You've got to keep the blood pressure in that person's system so they can breathe and their heart can pump and their lungs can work and their brain can function.
Let the trauma center deal with whatever else is happening.
Gunshot wounds, shattered bone, nerve damage, whatever's going on.
That's not your job as someone who's just responding to some emergency situation.
Every day on the street, carry type of situation.
You're not the trauma surgeon, so don't focus on that.
Somebody gets their A hand, you know, chopped off in a car accident, let's say.
Their hand is just gone.
And there's blood spurting out of their forearm.
Alright, so what's your job?
Your job, stop the blood.
You know, put that tourniquet a few inches above that, the point where it was severed.
Stop that blood flow.
Keep that person conscious and alive.
And then after that, yeah, if you could find the hand, maybe, that'd be awesome.
But you're going to send that with the patient on the, you know, airlift response or ambulance response or whatever.
It's not your job to put the hand back on, obviously.
You're just there to keep this person alive, let the surgeons deal with the rest.
You know, it could be any kind of situation.
Another thing that I learned...
Recently is the context of the injury really matters.
The way that you handle people who need your emergency help.
For example, if someone's taken a gunshot, let's say it's a young, healthy soldier type of person, and they've taken a gunshot to a limb, like an arm or a leg, and it's a through and through shot.
There's trauma, you know, there's tissue damage, maybe even a lot of blood loss happening.
But that person, other than that gunshot, they're healthy.
They don't have, let's say, a shattered pelvis.
They don't have knee problems.
You can move that patient around.
You can manipulate that person's body.
You can roll them over or roll them on their side if you need to in order to get a better angle on putting a tourniquet on, things like that.
You're not going to hurt that person by manipulating their limbs as you're trying to stop the blood.
But a person who has just been in a very traumatic, you know, high-speed crash, like a motorcycle accident, for example, very different situation.
For a motorcycle accident patient, typically you want to immobilize them because moving them could subject them to long-term permanent paralyzation.
They could have spinal injury.
They could have neck injury.
They could have Pelvic injuries, their pelvis may be shattered.
They do not have the pelvic integrity, perhaps.
So if you're walking up on somebody, if you just saw somebody get rolled over in a motorcycle accident, you absolutely need to be thinking about immobilization, internal damage, skeletal trauma, and not focused on gunshot wounds or things like that.
Because that's not what the wound is.
And that person may not be bleeding externally.
They may be bleeding internally.
But you, with a tourniquet, there's nothing you can do about an internal bleeding.
If you don't see the blood coming out, you're not going to be able to really do much to stop it.
And again, it's not your job.
You're just Mr.
or Mrs.
Bystander.
You're trying to help, but what can you do for a traumatic motorcycle injury victim?
Not as much.
Not as much as you might think.
Very little you can do.
Except try to keep the patient breathing.
Try to keep the patient warm if you're in a cold area.
If they're lying on the ground.
Guess what?
If the temperature outside is Anything below, you know, 60 degrees, that road or that concrete might be sapping their body heat.
They can become hypothermic pretty quickly laying there on the ground.
So there are a lot of things you can do in terms of maintaining core body temperature.
You can wad up a shirt and put it under their head.
You can, you know, you can check for other wounds, of course.
But again, you have to be careful not to move their body around too much.
There's also legal liability in all of this.
You arrive on a scene, you're not a trained medic or an EMT or a firefighter, what have you.
You're just an average civilian who happens to know some first aid.
There's no...
I know there are good Samaritan laws out there that may offer you some protection, but if you go in and start going, like, super doctor, I'm going to jam a chest tube into this person.
We're going to vent his lung.
First of all, you don't know what you're doing.
You might kill the guy, and you might be criminally charged.
So don't try that crap.
It's not your job.
And even if you are a surgeon who knows how to do that, you still need to probably call your lawyer.
Is this a good idea?
I mean, obviously, you want to save lives, but You don't know everything that happened to this person.
You haven't had x-rays.
You don't know.
So you have to practice caution and also wait for trained paramedics to arrive on the scene who can take over and they've got better equipment.
They've got probably better training and they can do more assessments than you can.
So these are all very important things.
It's not always about diving in and just doing every possible thing you can think of.
Sometimes it's about just helping the patient maintain and keep them alive as best you can and clear the area and wait for help to arrive.
Sometimes that is the best option depending on the circumstances and what's been happening.
So I hope this is helpful information.
I encourage you to go out and take an EMT course or an emergency first aid course or definitely a CPR course.
Sometimes volunteer fire departments offer those courses.
Sometimes you can get these courses at a local, like a YMCA or a university.
So seek it out.
Go out and get some training.
Learn how to do CPR. Learn how to do the Heimlich maneuver, you know, for just starting there.
Learn how to apply tourniquet.
Carry a tourniquet on your person, not in the back of the trunk of your car.
Actually carry a tourniquet with you and learn how to use it.
You might be able to save your life and save the life of another person one day.
No joke.
This stuff can save lives.
So, thank you for listening, and thank you for sharing this information.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
You can read my website at naturalnews.com, and you can hear more of my podcasts at brighteon.com.
That's the YouTube alternative free speech video website, brighteon.com.
Thanks for listening.
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