Monday, January 25, 2016

Inside the Special Operations Combat Medic Course

The major bleeds never change. Nor do the sequences for each of them. If you understand how to identify and treat each of the six major bleeds in CTM you’ll be set up for success. But remember, if TPA was “a kick in the balls”, then CTM as the same instructor put it, is: “a battle-ax to the balls”… (again, pardon my French…). It’s excellent training. I can honestly say I’ve never done anything so challenging as CTM. When you understand it and get it right it’s a good feeling.

1 comment:

Chiu ChunLing said...

I'm going to go ahead and say something very cold and heartless.

Most "emergency response" medical care beyond basic first aid is worthless if you cannot reach a functioning modern hospital for additional treatment within a pretty short time-frame.

There are emergency response skills that are considerably more advanced than ordinary first aid for which subsequent hospitalization is recommended but not required for survival. Having those skills is far from useless...as long as you are able to make the decision in the event.

But in a real SHTF scenario, you are going to experience a LOT of problems where the correct answer is 'palliative care only'.

Of course, palliative care is best administered by someone who would have been able to do anything else that could have been done. So it's important to be able to do anything that could make a difference, because it's not very comforting to get palliative care from someone who wouldn't have been able to do anything else anyway.

Of course, nothing I can say is quite as cold as, "If however you want to get the best out of the experience, try to get selected to go to Flint, Michigan." Because "it has one of the highest rates of penetrating trauma per capita in the United States." Cue exciting details of the kind of experience you'll get from a clinical rotation there...and some heart-warming ones as well, so that kinda balances out.

I don't know any similarly heartwarming anecdotes to offset the cold realities of SHTF. Sorry.