2 ms·

Some versions of fast clotting agents have been reported to cause burns, so its not something you would want to use for little cuts. A study related to that: h

• briandear 8y ago
  Those burning clot agents aren’t used anymore (at least in the US/Israel/Europe.) I just did a trauma refresher with the Stanford trauma center and that very question came up. That study you referenced is 10 years old. The new stuff doesn’t burn.
• jschwartzi 8y ago
  Yeah. I am not a doctor, but I do have some limited first-aid training. I'm not advocating that everyone should use this type of gauze. But I was pointing out that in the case of severe bleeding this gauze would be better than simply closing the wound and hoping for the best. In fact, during my training I was told that you don't want to close an arterial bleed, because the artery will simply continue bleeding copious amounts of blood into the (now closed) cavity. In my mind use of a medical device such as this type of gauze should be the subject of a risk/benefit analysis, where the risk is potential for burning in some cases versus the risk of bleeding out. If you've got a cut that isn't pumping arterial blood then you can probably rely on the body's own copious clotting agents to stop the bleeding. However if the patient is likely to bleed out, then it may be better to use quikclot gauze or similar, because the choice is "die from blood loss" versus "receive some burns." A different calculus might apply in cases where you're not in the backcountry because the medical response speed is much faster. I wouldn't assume that search and rescue has a response time less than 6 or 8 hours, and if the conditions are especially shitty and you're far enough away from a trailhead it might be a day or two before you can expect rescue. From what I understand it can take an hour or two before the SAR people in my area are even headed toward their base. From there it could be another hour or two before they can mount a response, and then there's time spent in transit and time spent searching for you. Under those conditions it shifts the mental calculus from solutions that will work for less than an hour toward solutions that will work for hours or days. So it's probably better to take a burn that won't get much worse instead of an arterial bleed that will kill you in less time than it takes for SAR to start driving to the chopper from wherever they're on-call at.
• jki275 8y ago
  Those have been taken off the market as far as I recall. The ones on the market now should not have that problem.