World

Inflatable tourniquet will reduce battlefield deaths

Tourniquet slows blood flow by squeezing damaged blood vessels, giving medical crew much-needed time to stop bleeding.

Express January 24, 2012

Rebels are commonly trained to aim just below a soldier’s body armour — the abdominal area that meets the legs. When a bullet hits strikes area, it causes massive internal bleeding which often proves fatal in just a matter of minutes. Now two physicians specializing in emergency medicine have now developed a tool designed to treat rapid lethal war injuries. The device, which is called the abdominal aortic tourniquet, effectively retards bleeding and gives much needed time to thwart the flow of blood which could save a soldier’s life.

Both the physicians — Dr. Richard Schwartz and Dr. John Croushorn — have served in the military, developed the inflatable abdominal aortic tourniquet for use in conflict situations after personally witnessing first-hand the massive damage that a well-placed bullet was capable of doing.

Before this invention, there was no suitable instrument designed to combat the injury, so soldiers were often forced to compress the wound by pressing a knee into the mid-abdominal area in order to retard bleeding. But this actually ended up blocking the passage of blood to the legs.

“There is no way to put a tourniquet around it, so soldiers are getting shot in this area and dying within several minutes,” said Dr. Richard Schwartz, Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine in the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University.

However, the wedge-shaped invention is designed to be wrapped around the abdomen and inflated with a hand pump. Once it has been inflated, the tourniquet slows blood flow by squeezing the damaged blood vessels, giving the medical crew much-needed time to stop the bleeding.

“By effectively cross-clamping the aorta with the abdominal aortic tourniquet, you are essentially turning the faucet off,” said Dr. John Croushorn, Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Trinity Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama. “You are stopping the loss of blood from the broken and damaged blood vessels. You are buying the patient an additional hour of survival time based on blood loss.”