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New Blood Stopper

Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:27 pm
by TheArmsman
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/ ... t-victims/

Aesop, have you heard of this before? And it also mentions not for use in certain parts of the chest, abdomen and pelvis. Is that because it could potentially cause organ failure?

Re: New Blood Stopper

Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:58 pm
by PawPaw
Yeah, I saw this a year or so ago, a guy was developing it to plug holes so all the blood didn't get out. At the time they said it was under development, being tested, yada, yada and all I could think about was "Faster, please." Anything we can do to give gunshot victims a better chance is okay with me.

Re: New Blood Stopper

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 6:41 am
by Aesop
If the article got it right (which is far from certain given general and specialist media obtuseness) it's a wagonload of bullshit.
If it isn't cleared for use in "certain" parts of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, WTF good is it? Jack and shit.
You're making a device that will be applied by 110-hr wondermedics with basic EMT certs, or at best by 6-month paramedics, and you're going to have them play "Do we or won't we?" games with the exact parts of the anatomy where tourniquets don't work?
Which have unhelpfully been blown open by bullets??
Total hype, hokum, and horseshit.

If you shoot that thing into a head wound, and it swells with blood collected, you've produced an unreduceable hematoma in the cranial vault. Stroke, and/or pushing the brains down through the spinal foramen (the hole at the bottom of the cranium where the brainstem lives and connects to the spinal column). The only more effective way to kill someone would be to pull their brains out with a crowbar and then stomp on it.

You can't put it into the chest, because it could tamponade the heart or major vessels, and they then have an unsolvable heart attack, or a hemothorax that a needle thoracotomy won't fix.

Ditto for the neck, where it could choke off blood flow to the brain, or block airways.

Put in inside the digestive tract, and you have a bowel obstruction that won't resolve. Ditto if it ends up in the bladder.

That eliminates 85% of the human body where it can't be used. :roll:

So when you eliminate the head, neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis ("certain parts"?? I repeat, total horseshit) you're left with the arms and legs: IOW the exact places where the CAT and SOF-T tourniquets are expressly designed to shine, and have done for near 15 years.

And on an anatomical note, the sponges (92 of them) are designed to absorb "up to a pint of blood" each. So what they've designed is a device to exsanguinate the entire body at the speed of blood loss, since you only have 10-14 pints of blood in your entire body. :shock:
So as the blood flows out the holes and into the sponges, it is removed from circulation permanently, to form a cluster of clotted sponges full of blood, and your veins and arteries are sopped entirely dry. Rapid and profound shock, coma, and death result, in short and irreversible order.
Fucking genius, that. If you're a mortician looking for a handy way to prep the body for burial. :o

On the spectrum from Shineola to shit, this appears to be a truckload of the latter. An utter abortion, without legs.

That analysis is based purely on the article, but I can't imagine where you'd shove it with the restrictions stated in the article, or how they expect field medics to utilize it under such recockulous restrictions under actual conditions.

If I hear or see more about it, and the maker has a better-than-the-underpants-gnome explanation of its function, utility, and restrictions that makes more sense, I'll revise that opinion.