Self Defense Medicine Session 4: Tourniquets: Arm Application

Now let's look at one handed self-application of a tourniquet. I've got my SOF-T wide here. It's already prepared and prepped. So once I've deployed this, I'm simply going to grab and hold on to, put the buckle in the palm of my hand with the tail facing me and simply slide it up, up into my arm. And the rules of a tourniquet is you apply them up as high as you can, but never on a joint.

Once I get this up into my arm a lot of people have a tendency to raise their arm up to think that this will help them a little bit. Well not really, think about that if you're injured in your arm you may or may not be able to move it. So, worst case scenario if it's lying lifeless there by your side, that's actually going to help and you can actually pinch that tourniquet as you can see, it doesn't fall down. So maybe, even if I can I still do have the capability of using, utilizing this arm. Sure.

But the best way to do that is to simply pinch and hold that tourniquet. Now I've kind of slid the base of it towards the rear cause it's going to end up in the front of my arm. Okay? The body's 360 degrees right? And three-dimensional So, I'm going to simply take up this slack and pull this strap.

Now notice when I'm pulling the strap I don't just pull in one direction and keep going one path. I actually wrap it around and almost bring it around towards the front of my chest and back towards me. Now I've taken up as much of that slack as I can and it's not going to be perfect using just one hand. If I need to I can pull this, pull the windlass over just a little bit if I have to. Then I'm going to start turning the windlass either direction it really doesn't matter.

Then I'm going to turn this until either the blood is either, stopped, stopped bleeding out of the injury or it's to a manageable flow. Meaning it's not going to turn off just like a water faucet, Okay? When you're turning on and off the faucet at your sink. but I need to turn this until the bleeding's manageable or it has stopped. Now, if you can see that anchoring device notice the anchoring device slides back and forth.

Now I'm simply going to take this, the windlass and anchor it into that turn, into that anchoring device. Don't forget now I'm going to also come in here and put the time of when I applied that tourniquet. All right. So it's pretty simple technique but be sure you get that up high as you can. The two reasons tourniquets fail.

One, people hesitate too long to put them on. And two, they put them on in the wrong position. Usually people put them a lot lower than they think they need to be. Several students over the years have asked me how long should it take you to apply a tourniquet? And after seeing, after six years of training and seeing different students from different backgrounds and different ways of deploying them and carrying a tourniquet and storing them it seems to be a good number is about 12 seconds.

So there's just watching students, whether they're grabbing from ankle rig or out of their go-bag or out of a vehicle or out of their back pocket, 12 seconds seems to be about how long it should take you to apply, deploy a tourniquet and apply it once you decided hey, this is what I need to do. So to summarize, tourniquets, you need to make sure you apply it as high as you possibly can. Don't hesitate to put it on when you need to. Never apply it on a joint. And don't forget to put the time on the tourniquet.

So that way the rescue personnel know how long it's been on.