logo
mobile-logo
HomePosts Tagged "wounds"

For some newbies, the topic may elicit some bravado – “wow, an open wound. Neat! I was looking forward to testing out my new suturing kit.” It’s never like that; the worst thing that could happen to you in an SHTF situation is being forced to deal with an injury of this caliber. Of course, it’s even shittier if you’re the one who has been wounded and no one around to provide medical assistance.

Learn how to both diagnose and treat any medical problems you are going to encounter. Learn more about it here.

I want to share with you some tricks and tips that will be of great use to you in open wound management. Pray to God that it will never come to that, but you never know where life takes you.

Open Wound Management for NMPs (Non-medical personnel) and preppers

 

You know what’s the real golden rule of prepping? Shit can happen anywhere. And, unfortunately, it does. Scrapes, bruises, and nicks are very common around a household, especially when you have kids or if you’re that kind of person that has butter fingers. There’s nothing special about treating small cuts – apply pressure, wash, clean, and disinfect.

That’s all there is to it! Still, considering the crazy world we live in, even a trip to the corner store can turn into a deadly, Indiana Jones-like expedition. This is the very reason why you should always be ready to tackle any kind of emergency, no matter its nature.

As far as today’s subject is concerned, a good friend of mine, who also happens to be a thoracic surgeon in his spare time, one told me that the best thing you could do about an open wound would be to leave it alone.

Related Knowledge to survive any medical crisis situation

Yes, I know it sounds crazy and rather dangerous considering that germs are always looking for ways to get inside our bodies, but there’s a good reason why doctors approach open wounds in this manner. Let’s backtrack a bit.

Regardless of the medical emergency, the first thing you need to do is to assess the patient. Check breathing, pulse, and state of consciousness. Many first-aid manuals state that the patient should not be moved unless he’s in immediate danger.

For instance, if a person is involved in a car accident, you should attempt to yank him out of the vehicle before the gas ignites it. So, if your patient is in danger, carry him to safety as fast as possible before assessing his condition.

In dealing with open wounds, hypovolemic shock and loss of consciousness are your opponents. When a person loses 20 to 40 percent of blood, his organs will begin to shut down one by one. Passing out is a distinct possibility.

However, if the blood volume cannot be restored, that person will die. Hypovolemic shock is a very common occurrence in case of open wounds. This is why the next step you will need to take would be to stop the bleeder.

Ask the patient to lie flat on his back and elevate the wound (if it’s on the leg, raise the his\her leg above body level). You may need to improvise some sort of stand; a rock, an old crate, a trashcan or anything that will help you raise the wounded limb.

Next order of business would be to figure out where’s the bleeding coming for – if an artery was severed or lacerated, then the blood will come out spurting. On the other hand, if it’s a vein, the blood coming out will flow.

Related 4 Important Forgotten Skills used by our Ancestors that can help you in any crisis

Why do you need to know this? Because each scenario comes with a different approach. For instance, in case of a venous hemorrhage, it’s enough to pack it with sterile gauze in order to stop the bleeding.

On the other hand, if you’re dealing with an arterial hemorrhage, apart from packing it with sterile gauze, you will also need to compress the upper part of the artery to control the bleeding, giving your body enough time to perform what docs call hemostasis (stopping the bleeding).

Treating Open Wounds

Once you have assessed the patient, elevated the wound, and identified the bleeder, it’s time to act. At this point, it’s important to stop the bleeding. It doesn’t matter if the wound’s filled with dirt or anything. You can concern yourself with those things after your patient no longer loses blood.

To do that, apply a sterile gauze right on the wound and apply pressure. If the wound continues to bleed, use another gauze. Stack as may gauzes or clean cloth as you see fit. Keep the pressure constant, even if you feel like your hands are about to give up on you.

In the meantime, if the patient’s conscious, ask him or her to drink water. Plenty of it! Remember that your goal is to replenish the liquids lost through the wound.

This is the only place where you can get DR. RALPH LA GUARDIA’S THE DOOMSDAY BOOK OF MEDICINE

Keep pressure on the bleeder and add more gauze or cloth, if necessary. Once the bleeding has subsided, it’s time to tend to the wound. One of the most common mistakes I’ve encountered is yanking the bandages. Don’t do that – the barrier formed by clotted blood and those little cells that repair leaks is keeping the patient from bleeding.

Still, you will need to clean that wound to prevent infection. To do that, grab a bottle of sterilized water and pour over the bandage. Once the gauze has enough moisture, you will be able to remove it without too much difficulty. Stay calm! You’re almost to the finish line.

After removing the bandage, take a closer look at the wound site. Do you any dirt? Piece of wood or metal sticking out? If it’s just dirt, use plenty of clean water to wash the area. However, if there’s anything sticking out of the wound like a metal spike or, even worse, a protruding bone, leave them be.

Between washing, using a saline solution to flush the wound. In case your first-aid kit doesn’t include a syringe with saline solution, you can make some using a clean plastic bottle, water, and a tablespoon of fine rock salt. Mix, shake the bottle and use your survival knife to cut a small hole in the plastic cap. Use this liquid to flush the wound.

Remember when I told you about my doc friend who said that in most cases it’s better to leave the wound open? Well, that’s exactly what you must do. When you’re done cleaning and flushing the wound, apply a sterile gauze over the site to keep the area clean. You may also want to waterproof the site – wrap a sterile glove or an unfolded condom.

Now, in case the wound is smaller (one or one and a half inches between the skin flaps), you can attempt to suture it. Bear in mind that suturing is a last resort solution – you should only do this if you know that help will not reach you in time. In one of my articles, I’ve talked about how to do simple interrupted sutures.

Be sure your first-aid kit includes a suturing pack. Keep monitoring the wound for signs of infection – skin discoloration, oozing or acidic smell. If you’re lost in the wild, a quick way to keep infection at bay and stop tissue necrosis would be to use maggots. Yes, it sounds utterly disgusting, but those little suckers are great at eating dead tissue.

Wrap-up

Keep your priorities straight – assess, elevate, identify bleeder, hemostasis, wash, flush, and continue monitoring. Sounds like a no-brainer, but I can bet that you won’t feel that way once you’re facing a wound that won’t stop bleeding. You should also tell the patient to drink plenty of liquids.

Bleeders can go out of hand if the patient goes into a panic. That’s why it’s important to talk to him or her. Tell your patient that everything’s going to be okay and that help is on its way. Above all, don’t let him close his eyes. If you see that the victim is about to faint, pour some water over his face, and ask him to keep talking to you.

That’s basically all that you can learn as a non-medical person about open wound management. If you’re interested in learning more, check with your local Red Cross chapter. They’re bound to have a free advanced first-aid course. Any thoughts? Hit the comments section and let me know.

Other self-sufficiency and preparedness solutions recommended for you:

Healthy Soil + Healthy Plants = Healthy You

The vital self-sufficiency lessons our great grand-fathers left us

Knowledge to survive any medical crisis situation

Liberal’s hidden agenda: more than just your guns

Build yourself the only unlimited water source you’ll ever need

4 Important Forgotten Skills used by our Ancestors that can help you in any crisis

Secure your privacy in just 10 simple steps

0 Comments

For some newbies, the topic may elicit some bravado – “wow, an open wound. Neat! I was looking forward to testing out my new suturing kit.” It’s never like that;

What Never Spoils Could Never Hurt You

Today’s tool recommendation? How about honey? Sweet…of me, I know. But I’m serious. Here’s what my honey can do.

Honey never spoils…you could eat thousand-year-old honey if you found it. Why is that, you ask?

The reason is simple …honey has amazing antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral properties…so nothing can really grow in it and hence it does not spoil. And that is one of the reasons it is so good to use on wounds. The Romans were masters of practicality…they did incredibly well with what little they had.

Physicians in the Roman army routinely slathered honey on all those nasty wounds their troops had after battles. They did not have the luxury of modern antibiotics and so they used honey and herbal treatments.

I have used honey in my practice for over twenty-five years with great success. Wound clinics routinely prescribed ridiculously expensive creams and salves for my patients, and many times with little success. I routinely intervened and told them to buy a jar of raw local honey at the farmer’s market or the local grocer. After using my honey treatment they returned to the wound clinics and repeatedly astonished the doctors and nurses there with their speedy recovery and lack of infections.

Honey and Wound Healing

Here’s the science behind honey’s amazing properties.

  • Honey is very viscous (thick) and therefore has a very strong osmotic effect (think of osmosis as gravity).
  • Honey is very osmotically active so like gravity, it has a strong pull, so it pulls or draws fluids out of the less osmotically active wound, carrying debris, dirt, and bacteria, etc. away from the wound onto the dressing.
  • That is why it is good to apply the honey directly to a wound dressing and then apply that to the wound. This way you can change the dressing each time it is soaked with fluids from the wound.
  • This osmotic effect also helps keep the wound moist, preventing premature scabbing and aiding in healing.
  • Honey also has a very strong attractive effect upon water, which it will combine with and make it unavailable to thirsty bacteria, fungi, and viruses. As the bacteria in a wound feed on the glucose in honey they will produce lactic acid. This will also prevent the foul smell of many wounds.
  • As honey gets combined with water it will produce hydrogen peroxide. This is the same substance that your body’s white blood cells produce to destroy foreign invaders. This is why hydrogen peroxide has a strong antiseptic effect. This also promotes wound healing. The hydrogen peroxide in honey is steadily produced and hence has a long-term positive effect on the wound.
  • Honey also causes the chelation of iron, thus binding it to proteins and rendering it unavailable to bacteria, which need iron to reproduce. Therefore, whenever you bind iron up and make it unavailable to bacteria, you are producing an antimicrobial effect.
  • Honey also helps promote granulation of wounds. at is the step after the production of a clot to close a wound.

Note: Granulation tissue is the yellow tissue in the base of a wound. I have found that even by nurses it is very often mistaken for pus. is is your body’s way of filling in a wound gap and allowing normal tissue to grow into that from all sides and heal a wound. You can tell the difference of it from pus because it is nice and uniform, lining a wound with the look of a thin layer of lemon pudding and without any foul smell that pus usually produces.

Honey for Burns, Skin Ulcers, and Dry Skin

Honey also works very well on burns;

  • use it the same way, covering the burned area with a large gauze soaked with honey.
  • Change it just like the wound dressing, whenever it is soaked with fluids that it has drawn out of the burn. It will prevent the major problem with burns, infection.
  • It will also produce better healing and less scarring, which can be critical in treating burns.

Honey also works very well in skin ulceration. I have treated many patients with large, deep decubitus ulcers (bed sores) and they have healed remarkably well. Honey applied to a dressing along with proper positioning of the patient to alleviate those pressure points will work wonders for patients with bed sores.

Honey has also been used to treat dry, parched, or injured skin of any type. Women as far back as Cleopatra have used raw honey for face masks and to beautify their hair and skin. The great moisturizing effect of honey on dry, ageing skin is due to its ability to attract and retain moisture in the skin without making the skin too oily. For this reason as well as raw honey’s antibacterial effects, it works very well in cases of acne.

Raw honey has been used for every conceivable kind of skin problem, including athlete’s foot.

Honey for an Upset Stomach

  • Raw honey, when combined with ginger and lemon juice, makes a very potent treatment for nausea and vomiting as well as gastric distress of any type, including ulcers.
  • Raw honey also contains large amounts of amylase which is concentrated in the pollen of flowers. Amylase is a digestive enzyme that digests starches such as bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice, thus it aids in digestion and is an excellent treatment for indigestion.

I think I made you consider at least getting some to just eat it, for now.

Question is – What Type of Honey Should You Buy?

Dr. La Guardia tell you all about it in his book; the community is already referring to it as The Bible of Survival.

Are you ready to finally make the switch from surviving to thriving?

Get this book today.

0 Comments

Honey never spoils