5 hours with a tourniquet is a real problem, even if the wound tracks are not.
I designed products that stop bleeding for 8 years. The whole industry is a mess on the first responder side.
Training sucks, products are overly complicated and some of them create separate significant problems (like zeolites that heat up and create burns).
I couldn’t even get the money men at my companies to put together a real, legitimate trauma kit, because getting EMTs and medics to retrain is such a significant problem.
Can you imagine the “I lost my leg for your freedom” tour?
Fuck Prince and his BS private mercenary business.
if youre bleeding for 8 years youre screwed though?!?
I think women live until they’re 80?
Yeah lol

Don’t stop believing, brah
This is a weird hill for you to battle on my man.
I’m sorry you have lived a mundane life and are embarrassed by it though!
Was he fighting Iran single handily over there?
Will he be tried for murder with the people he likely killed shooting back?
I know people my guy.. 80% are full shit and other 20% Lie.. pick your side.. I’m leaning your full of shit category
It’s okay , we all lie.. we’re not Jesus
I killed fitty ayrabs in afganie-stan
DiSul, can you speak to the use of wound-filling foam products in the sandbox?
I had a supposed multi-tour medic in one of my EMT recert. classes many moons ago. He talked some about them, but he wasn’t super smart and didn’t know details.
FRAT warning.
Of course! I made them out of both a chitosan and polysaccharide base for my company. They are freeze dried foam pads.
They have positives and negatives. The foam does not “flow” in to the wound like a powder, so if you have a restricted wound tract (like a bullet wound), it is effectively useless. Positive is that for wounds with good access, they were more instinctively easy to use and worked well with a good protocol.
If you didn’t have access to the wound site, they were useless for arterial bleeds.
They’re made of shrimp exoskeletons, so some people were allergic.
The big player in that space was HemCon. They are pressed flat after freeze drying, making them dog shit IMO. They do it because the tops of the products aren’t consistent due to how the water comes off during lyophilization, so they look worse/inconsistent and corporate don’t like that.
I liked having them in their unpressed form, so you could use that extra “fluffiness” to press it in to wounds and take up void space. Pressing them flat also degraded their ability to take on water (basically plasma in blood) until they started swelling.
Another problem was that the interface between the blood and the pad would gel, which required a full 5 minutes of heavy pressure in the correct and consistent way (somewhat true of all products) to start damming the red blood cells and platelets and initiate the coagulation cascade. If you moved pressure too early, you could move that gel interface and start compartment syndrome without realizing it.
The chitosan product was also very sticky and hard to detach (when you could get them to work properly) in order to clean the wounds for surgeons. They were not fans.
If you’re just covering a superficial wound, they’re great. The combat medics who worked on a lot of real wounds did not like them in my experience and they really hated the zeolite granular product made by QuikClot, which were the 2 standard issue products. They would default to tourniquets almost exclusively.
The foam pads were mediocre products in the right hands for heavy bleeds, but the training people got on the products was FUCKING TERRIBLE - making them worse. We had the benefit of lots of pig studies to test the products and figure out protocols. We cut a lot of arteries…
Overall I’d say they were simply bad products for the application.
I could go on, but if you have any specific questions or if he said anything outlandish, let me know.



