Speaking of TQ’s and bleeding…..I was in WalMart the other day and beheld this:
Kind of interesting. My first thought was that I would not trust a tourniquet purchased at WalMart any more than I would trust a Mexican space shuttle. WalMart is basically a retail showroom for Chinese manufacturing, and I don’t trust anything Chinese as far as I can throw it. I checked the label on this kit and it was:
“Made in USA of domestic & global materials”. Okay, my logic is if it is not exclusively “Made In USA”, then its really ‘Made in China’ and put together/packaged in USA.
However, I freely admit I may be wrong. I didn’t feel like spending $16 to find out exactly what the quality of this was because, and this may be short sighted, it’s a $16 TQ from WalMart. Just the TQ alone should cost more than that if it was a quality TQ.
A quick trip to the company’s Amazon website says, among other thihngs, “We Make Kits”. Not that they make products, but rather they make kits. Meaning, to me, they purchase components, assemble them into a package, slap a label on them, and sell them as a kit. I respect the business model, I question the quality.
But, as I said, I wasn’t going to drop sixteen bucks to find out if there’s actual QuickClot and a NAR TQ in there, or some off-brand made-in-China ‘equivalent’. Why would I? You get what you pay for in this world and I have absolutely no faith that this is going to be anything more than a accumulation of offshore-made ‘medical products’ that have been re-packaged into a sharp-looking package and trundled out to mass retailers. Who is the market for this? Probably the people who don’t want to do the math, don’t want to do the research, don’t want to spend the money, and just want to purchase something to tuck in a closet so they can say “I’m prepared”. These are the same people who buy prepackaged ‘Three day survival backpacks’ and the like. Broadly speaking, preparedness is not something you can simply outsource to a company or buy off Amazon. Your needs are unique and only you can know what you do and don’t need for your anticipated emergency. You wouldn’t call your local grocery store and simply say “Sell me the groceries I need for the coming year”, would you? No…you know what you like and don’t like, and thus you take the effort to go and shop.
Perhaps I’m being too hard on this product. In reality, the product is not the focus of my disdain. My disdain is directed at the people who would trust this product. Bleeding to death because you tried to save $15 at WalMart instead of paying full freight for name-brand gear from a reputable, albeit more expensive, source is an embarrassing way to die.
If anyone wants to go to WalMart, buy one of these, disect it, and let me know if the quality is/isn’t there….please go ahead. Or, feel free to throw a few bucks at me through Patreon and I’ll head down there, pick one up, and give it the go.
I know that Quik-Clot granulated stuff was out again few years back. It actually worked quite well.
Reference the movie shooter. Bob Lee in the back seat of a stolen FBI Crown Victoria using Quick- Clot to stop the bleeding after being shot twice.
Now it’s almost impossible to find. I also understand that military medics are carry tampons to shove into a bullet wound. They normally use the extra absorbent. But they do work.
I have seen numerous articles and YouTube videos that absolutely excoriate the idea that shoving a tampon into a bullet wound is an effective solution. Yet, it seems to be difficult to put an end to this “urban myth.”
If you do an internet search, I’m sure that you’ll find them.
When I was back in uniform (as a physician, despite more than 20 years of hiding it from Big Blue) I had more idiot medics try and tell me that they were better than effective wound packing, hemostatic agents, and tourniquets based on some story they got at Ft Sam, or their senior, or whatever.
“Son, your 16 weeks at Ft. Sam, and three months in asscrackistan doesn’t begin to compare to the literally thousands of gunshot victims I’ve seen, an treated, in 30 years being an emergency physician in an inner-city trauma center, after four years of medical school and four years of residency. Also, that oak leaf hanging on my shirt says this is a pointless conversation, doesn’t it?”
1. Tampons don’t have the capacity to absorb enough blood from a gunshot wound. Not even close.
2. Take a class in wound packing, you’ll quickly see how they would be completely inadequate.
No, tampons do not work, no matter what medics think.
They do not absorb much blood – take one, weigh it, then soak it in water and weigh it again. How much does it hold? 10 grams?
Further, they do not apply much pressure on the wounds to tamponade the wound. And they’re not exactly packed for field use.
Quikclot gauze, and Celox-A applicators are readily available – try Chinookmed.com. They are also a reliable source for North American Rescue tourniquets. The other source for the TQs is NAR themselves (narrescue.com). Both Chinook and North American are reliable sources, good to deal with and don’t pay me a damned thing for saying so.
I would not buy a TQ other than a C-A-T gen 7, and only from either of the two sources.
The other designs? Testing by the TCCC (Tactical Combat Care Committee) shows they don’t work well or at all.
Buying from some other source? Including Amazon, some other website? Some surplus source? You really have no idea what you’re going to get, despite the labeling.
The CATs in particular are frequently faked on Amazon, from the worst of Chinese suppliers. Spend the $30 or so the real thing, from the real source, will cost you. Buy a separate ‘training’ tq to use for training
I do carry a couple of SWAT-T tourniquets but for compression over a wider area, not traumatic hemostasis.
You are absolutely correct, my son is a active duty PJ, stationed in Japan. He was doing some training with the Japanese equivalent of of their PJs and he noticed they were using a ‘knock-off’ TQ, so he snapped the spindle on it and told them they were a POS. They finally understood as they snapped their own spindles off. He supplied them with the CAT-gen 7 from NAR. He knows his way around a TQ, did several tours in Afghanistan during IED days…
I admire your son. I wimped out in Basic (I enlisted before my commissioning) for the PJ speil – it was late at night after lights out and I was tired (The FIRST test and I failed)… Then I had the joy of seeing a Jolly Green coming to pick my ass up after I ejected from my F4. Please give him my admiration. And, he’s right about the TQs.
Will do Doc! Thank you for your service.
Quick correction on the URL for NAR:
narescue.com
Single “r” — the original URL sent me to a GoDaddy page.
Suture self.
You want to get your medical advice from Sumdood, instead of from Expert People Who Do this For A Living, go ahead on. I’ve probably only excoriated that nonsense online a dozen times, usually in depth and detail. Life’s too short.
I did carry tampons in my movie kit for decades.
Because Barbie-twin extras forgot to bring any, and their monthly period started that day on set. Like 20 times a year, for twenty years. Being a guy, when they found out I had them, they thought I was Einstein. No, just smarter than background actors. Pretty low bar, as it happens.
My trauma pack had no tampons. Because there are any dozen much better choices.
(Anyone, see if you can figure out why hospitals – especially trauma centers that see more gunshots and stabbings in a month than you’ll see in your entire life, and more combat casualties than the Marines saw their first six months in Afghanistan – stock gauze 2x2s, 4x4s, and gauze and ACE wrap by the metric fuckton, despite the availability of tampons since 1929. Go ahead, suss it out, I triple-dog dare you.)
And if anyone, military or civilian, is using them for bullet wounds, or intending to, they’re being total idiots. Unless the entire world is in literal ashes after the zombpocalypse, and your only choice is down to either one old tampon, or else rubbing some mud and dog sh*t on it.
But you do you. YOYO.
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Carry on.
Decades ago I purchased a package of OB-brand tampons, and include a couple in my (large) trauma packs. They have multiple uses, but my main goal was to use them to tamponade intractable nosebleeds. With the string hanging out of the nares.
Now they have purpose built devices for such use. Much larger to carry, much more expensive, not any more effective.
If the TQ isn’t TCCC approved hard pass. Heard too many stories of knockoff fails in stop the bleed classes. Be ok for a practice TQ but that’s it.
I think you should pay for supplies commensurate with your resources, your will and how much you value the remainder of your life. Not joking. I would not invest all my savings to live 10 days longer and leave my wife with nothing. We need to balance everything, always tradeoffs.
The problem with saving $10 on a knock-off TQ is that they don’t work, so you’ve wasted $20 of your resources on …. false hope.
I get the idea of saving – why spend $400 on a custom knife (say) when a $20 mora will do the job just as well? But don’t spend $20 on some chinesieum piece of crap that will rust and snap before you use it.
No need to buy it to see how crappy it is. If you look on the Walmart website it shows a pic of the contents. The “tourniquet “ is a strap of thin rubber with a quick release tab on it. Garbage.
That “TQ” is basically what is used in a blood draw to accentuate veins. Slightly better than nothing. I will say that the workplace first aid kit sold at Sam’s Club by the same people is pretty solid. Room to add a few trauma items and some medications and you are good to go.
“You get what you pay for in this world” I would be very pleased if I got what I paid for in this world, but most purchases bring a large dose of disappoint.
As Will ROgers said, be grateful you don’t get all the government you pay for.
I get more graft, theft, extortion and blue suited thuggery than I could ever pay for. The idiocy is just a bonus but not worth tipping
so true, once an RN I am painfully aware if necessary trade offs.woulf not pend lastvdollar when loved one could suffer for it
I agree with Flight ER Doc. My additional comment has two parts.
First: Walk Mart? Freaking seriously?
Secondly: figure out what (your)(your family’s) life is worth, and budget accordingly.
That tampon thing has been debunked so often, by so many reputable sources, that I can’t even….
And, I like the “weigh one dry, weigh one soaked in water” experiment. As a guesstimate, 1 mil of blood is in the (very rough) neighborhood of 1 gram. Zany would that threatens life will NOT dump 10 MLS of blood.
If only 10 times as much blood is lost (100 ml) that is a relatively “good” day.
Also, as I’ve written here before, having an aid bag all filled with even the latest TCCC approved goodies is not going to save anyones life – unless there is the whole chain of evacuation ready to swoop in and evacuate the casualty to the appropriate level of care.
So, you might be good out hiking or hunting….if you have comms to call for help. When it all falls apart? What then? That bag is going to get very empty, very fast treating just one casualty for more than 12 to 24 hours. The material medica needed to treat them is either heavy (IV solutions) or bulky as hell (bandage in the quantities needed) or temperature sensitive (many drugs) or all three.
My solution for long term care? Find physicians, veterinarians, RNs with Emergency, or surgical experience in the community and protect them like your stash of PMs.
A guy from the internet I’ve become friends with over the last dozen years son is a National Guard medic and had him ask if they carry tampons in their Aid bags. His reply is quoted, “Hell yes I do. With the amount of women now in the ranks, nearly every drill if we’re in the field one comes up to me asking if I have a tamp or pad because they just started their cycle and forgot to bring some”.
So, should they be in a med bag? Yep, JUST FOR that purpose. Been keeping some in my various kits for a while and have handed them out before and became the hero instead of all that other cool trauma gear we’ve been told we need to carry for just in case.
Commander, just a thanks for the heads up on the NAR sale many months ago. Picked up a decent supply for less than I would have otherwise spent
Tribe helps tribe.