Uncontrolled bleeding is something that can put you in an early grave, so knowing how to maintain bleeding control at all times is a Prepper Med must must.
Of course, like all medical articles, we have our disclaimer… Salty, Spice and anybody reading this article on a prepper podcast are not doctors, nor do we pretend to be doctors on the internet. We are not offering medical advice, just presenting some first aid information as we understand it.
Bleeding control at all times
That’s the kicker to this article…
I’ve got ways to stop bleeding in every single emergency kit that I own, and I will wager there’s a good chance that you have ways to stop bleeding in yours.
Know what else I will wager? You don’t carry any supplies designed to stop bleeding with you everywhere you go. And that’s the point of this little article, to get you thinking “yeah, that’s a great bandage, but it’s in my emergency kit in my car, and my car’s a mile back at the parking lot…”
Now a careful reader might notice I used the word “supplies” in that last paragraph. Why, you might ask, did I do that?
Because hands.
Direct pressure
When a wound occurs, I think most people know to apply direct pressure to the wound.
Place pressure directly over where the patient is bleeding and use enough force to cause the bleeding to stop. Because blood coagulates, in most cases bleeding will slow down over time, and you can start to back off on the amount of force you are using to hold the wound closed.
Remove pressure GRADUALLY and be ready to drop it right back on the wound if the bleeding picks back up again.
Elevate, don’t exsanguinate? Well… thoughts have changed on that…
Exsanguinate is a cool sounding word, but it means bleeding to death… and, not surprisingly, bleeding to death is a bad thing.
Up until recently, one method taught to control bleeding (as an additional tool to be used with others) was to elevate the area of the body that was bleeding. I certainly learned to do this in Boy Scouts. I noticed while double checking my information for this article, however, that a lot of protocols no longer advise elevation.
So… to use elevation, the trick is to elevate the wound above the level of the bleeding person (or animal’s, if it’s a pet) heart. Fortunately, most people are easy to convince to elevate their injuries. Try it on a cat and you will probably end up bleeding more than the cat is.
Me? I say why not? What’s the harm? It may help and it won’t hurt anything.
Bleeding control via pressure points
Pressure points were something I learned about way back in Boy Scouts (that’s right, ole Salty was a Boy Scout).
What are pressure points?
Well, there are parts of the body where you can apply pressure and pinch the arteries that feed the bleeding vessel at least partially closed to reduce the bleeding.
Here’s a chart that shows various different places in the body you can find pressure points. Not surprisingly, these are also the same places in a body that are commonly used by medicos to find a pulse.
The key is to find a pressure point so that the point is between the wound and the heart. You need to reduce the amount of blood pumping out of the wound, and to do this, you have to reduce the flow of the arteries to the area.
Place pressure on the pressure point above the wound but nearest to it. The picture above shows where you can look for pressure point spots, but you are going to have to feel around with your hands to find out exactly where to push. When you find the right spot, you’ll be pushing soft tissue, including the artery, against a bone just beneath that artery. Pressure points are where they are because important arteries lie just between somewhere you can get your thumb and a nice solid bone.
You know when you find the right spot because the bleeding slows. If it’s an artery bleed, that really disturbing squirt, squirt of blood stops — Hallelujah! Again, because blood coagulates, in most cases bleeding area will clot up and the tendency to bleed will reduce over time. After several minutes you can start to back off on the amount of force you are using to press the pressure point while watching to be sure the bleeding doesn’t pick up again.
As before with direct pressure, remove pressure GRADUALLY and be ready to drop it right back on the pressure point if the bleeding picks back up again.
You can actually practice finding pressure points by feeling at those places for a pulse. I (Spice) recommend this; these things always look easier on a diagram than they are in real life. There is a knack to finding the right spot quickly you pick up with practice.
It’s all about the arteries, baby!
When you see blood pumping, rather than just seeping out smoothly, that’s arterial blood, not blood from a vein. Don’t get me wrong, you can bleed to death from a cut vein… but a sliced artery is much more dangerous when it comes to blood loss.
That’s why we need to pay attention to where the arteries are when we deal with bleeding control, instead of the veins. It’s also the arteries that feed blood from the heart into the tissues, so if you stop up the artery the veins carrying blood away from the same tissue will also stop bleeding.
The bad part about using pressure points & direct pressure
You see, there’s this little thing called necrosis… and it’s a BAD little thing.
If you cut off the blood flow to a part of your body, before long the cells in that area are going to start croaking louder than bullfrogs in a Mississippi swamp when the skeeters are out (BTW this is hillbilly speak for “a lot”). A good rule of thumb is 10 minutes: After ten minutes of blood being completely cut off to a tissue, that tissue is likely to start dying.
Hopefully you can get some help or some further bandaging supplies or blood clotting mixture before that time is up, or the bleeding will have slowed enough that you can back off on the direct or pressure point pressure.
If it’s been ten minutes and the thing still squirts when you reduce pressure, it all comes down to situational judgement on how bad the bleeding is vs. potential loss of limb.
Let’s be careful necking!
There are lots of critical arteries in the noggin, and you REALLY need to know exactly what you are doing before you go closing any of them off.
There’s a little pipe on each side of the throat called the carotid artery, and that baby is really important to keeping the mind healthy and well. Carotid blood is, literally, brain food. Direct pressure to shut off the carotid is likely to cause brain damage in not very many minutes.
Rhabdomyolysis… seriously, who thinks these words up?
Ok, what in the name of Mike Ditka is rhabdomyolysis, and why on earth should I care about it?
Well, rhabdomyolysis (i’m using the word rhabdomyolysis a lot because I learned how to spell it and this is the only time in my life I’m ever actually likely to use the word rhabdomyolysis in an article) is a bad thing that can happen when you constrict arteries using any of the above methods, and also when using a tourniquet or Israeli bandage.
What happens is this: when there is a lot of damage to muscles, such as when the blood supply to them is shut down, the dying muscles release a bunch of their contents into the bloodstream. The kidneys can’t get rid of it all fast enough, and it can cause kidney failure. That’s outside the scope of this article, but most definitely a ‘bad thing’.
The bottom line
We carry two fantastic tools to control bleeding around with us all the time, every day.
Hands.
We just need to keep this in mind if and when a serious bleeding injury occurs.
We’ve done other articles here on 3BY about bleeding.
Before you go on about your business, check them out by clicking HERE and HERE and HERE or on the pictures below:
https://beansbulletsbandagesandyou.com/bullets/2018/02/23/preppermed-101-say-no-to-bleeding-part-1-clotting-aids/
https://beansbulletsbandagesandyou.com/bullets/2018/02/27/preppermed-101-say-no-to-bleeding-part-2-compression-bandages-2/
https://beansbulletsbandagesandyou.com/bullets/2018/07/30/preppermed-stopsbleeding-bandages/
I appreciated the article very much about Advanced Bleeding Control. I have taught over 50,000 students CPR/AED/FIRST AID over the past 30 years and indeed, things have changed. We used to teach direct pressure/pressure points/elevation but one problem was that few responders asked the patients if the victim had hit the back of their head (you can see the front!!) or if they are injured/hurt anywhere else BEFORE elevating a bleeding/injured limb. Obviously, elevating injured legs would be a problem for any abdominal/torso/head injury. I teach asking both questions early in the patient assessment. Recent protocols are for direct/pressure dressings, then tourniquets and hemorrhagic dressings/granules to stop bleeding that direct pressure cannot control. Wilderness First Aid and Wilderness First Responder use these protocols, as well.
Thank you, Marcy! Professional expertise such as this is irreplaceable.