You've tourniqueted the bleed or splinted the fracture, and checked the victim's pulse and blood pressure. You also need to make sure he's breathing, especially if he's unconscious.
Note: Several months after we held this seminar, the American Heart Association revised the order in which to do these steps from ABC to CAB. The rest of the information in the video still applies. (Note that the speaker references the upcoming change; the AHA just hadn't made it yet.)
The next installment in our series of first aid videos is on pulse and blood pressure - how to tell whether somebody's doing all right, or whether they're crashing or in the process of doing so, and what you can do to try and mitigate the latter.
This is the first part of the combat first aid seminar held at the dojo in July 2010, and contains the speaker's introduction, and a look at vital areas of the human body.
Yow! That splitting headache you sometimes get for a bit when you eat something cold? It's because the blood vessels in the roof of your mouth constricted suddenly and referred the pain there via the nerves in your head. Warm it back up, and eat more slowly!
But that's not the kind of brain freeze we want to address today - unless you happen to have an ice cream cone or cold drink handy to give to the bad guy and hope he gets one...
We'd been contemplating setting up a YouTube channel for a while. Given the huge response on Facebook to the first aid video we posted (you can see it in the previous entry, the link there is now to the YouTube version), we now have a channel.
A number of people were seriously injured in the bombings of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013. Many are still alive because others in the area were able to stop or reduce the bleeding from their wounds - using improvised tourniquets and other items - until first responders arrived.
As such, we thought it would be good to share an excerpt from the first aid seminar that was held at our dojo in July 2010. The speaker is one of our black belts. He is a Master Firefighter and former paramedic, and is still an EMT. The seminar as a whole addressed how to deal with various types of injuries or wounds using only what you have at hand.