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.

From a post at Bayou Renaissance Man, an article about how the improper, unnecessary, or overuse of tourniquets in Ukraine has led to ‘tens of thousands’ of unnecessary amputations.

The tourniquet has saved many thousands of lives and limbs in war zones around the world, but misuse of the device is causing huge numbers of excess amputations and deaths in Ukraine, say top military surgeons.

Captain Rom A Stevens, a retired senior US medical navy officer who has served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and East Africa, estimates that of the roughly 100,000 amputations performed on Ukrainian soldiers since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, as many as 75,000 were caused by improper use of tourniquets.

“I’ve seen tourniquets that have been left on for days, often for injuries that could have been stopped by other methods. Then [the patient] has to have their limb amputated because the tissue has died,” Captain Stevens told The Telegraph.

There is more to being prepared than just buying a tourniquet and shoving it in your gear. Much the same way buying a gun doesn’t make you ‘safer’ unless you actually, you know, learn how to use it. YouTube videos would, I’d imagine, be the minimum and the optimum would be one of those Stop The Bleed classes that seem to be everywhere.

This sort of segue’s into an argument that appears from time to time in the preparedness world: should you stock medical equipment that you are not qualified or trained to use? On the one hand, so the thinking goes, you are more likely to cause harm than good by using a piece of equipment, a drug, or a technique that you are unqualified to use. On the other hand, just because you don’t know how to use it does not mean there won’t be someone around who does. We’ve all read about car accidents where a bystander pulls over to help and its a nurse or doctor. You may not have the talent, but there may be someone around who does…and they need the right tools to maximize that talent.

Folks more knowledgeable than I will chime in on this subject, I’m sure. (cough*Aesop*cough)

So my doctors appointment was mostly uneventful. They didn’t really tell me anything I couldn’t already guess. (Exercise, lose some poundage, stop eating crap. Real surprise, right? That’ll be $450 please.)

Apparently they are screening for domestic violence or some such. I forgot to mention this gem from the new patient intake process:

Them: “Is there anyone who makes you feel unsafe at home?”

Me: “Well, the last time someone made me feel unsafe in my home, I killed them.”

Them: <pause> “Ok, the doctor will be with you shortly”

I understand that an argument could be made that the doctor needs to look at certain environmental considerations in order to get a full, well-rounded picture of your health. What you do for a living, what your living situation is, etc. You may have a rash on your skin that no one can explain…until the doctor discovers that you work in a plutonium processing plant, at which point the penny drops. So, yes, I can understand some of the questioning. But at the same time, I’m just here for some bloodwork…not to trade life stories with some assistant.

However, some doctor/patient interactions are interesting stories. I had an elderly customer come into the shop once with a beautifully preserved old Smith .32 revolver. I asked the customer, who was a doctor, how he had come into such a lovely and well-preserved pre-war Smith. Turned out his dad was a stereotypical country doctor …taking payment in chickens, that sort of thing…back during the Depression. One day dad and the sheriff had to go quarantine a family. This was back in the day where they would nail a notice of quarantine on the house and everyone would keep away and isolate the residents. So the doctor and the sheriff go up on the porch and start tacking this notice up on the door. A gunshot rings out and the deputy tumbles backwards with a bullet where his beltplate should have been, the bullet coming right through the door the deputy had been tacking the notice onto. The doctor, demonstrating the better part of valor, rockets of the porch and into a ditch by the road. He then runs down the road to a house with a phone and calls the sheriff. Sheriff comes out and they drag the guy out of the house and haul him to jail. As the sheriff is winding things down, he walks up to the doc, tosses him the pistol the bad guy used, and says “Here. Souvenir.” And his dad kept that pistol for the rest of his life and it wound up going to my customer. He had no intention of selling it, but liked telling the story.

I bet that country doctor never asked anyone about their preferred pronouns, what their ‘assigned’ sex at birth was, or if anyone in the house made them feel unsafe. Different, and in some ways better, times.

The year is 7.67% done and so far I have only bought __1__ gun

This article was linked to by someone in comments a few posts back. H/T to them for bringing it to my attention. I thought it was worth sharing. Regardless of your stance on this war (or any war), there are objective facts in this story worth noting. Apparently those knockoff tourniquets really do cost lives in the field.

I saw some of our soldiers pass away after receiving Chinese replica tourniquets. Tourniquets are devices used to apply pressure to a limb or extremity in order to stop the flow of blood, and I am heavily reliant on them. If you have arterial bleeding, you can die in three minutes, and if that tourniquet breaks, there’s no chance for you. Statistically, three out of four wounded soldiers in this conflict can die from hemorrhagic blood loss. So, high-quality tourniquets became a really important topic for me.

So when I say that it’s worth the extra $ to make sure youre getting the real deal rather than a ‘close enough’ cheaper Chinese copy, it’s not just me.

Read the article, its short and a bit empty but if you Google the gal in the article there’s some interesting stuff about what she’s doing.

In the meantime, the moral of this story is: some stuff is not worth choosing based solely on cost.