6 Life Saving Techniques From the Movies (That Can Kill You)
#3.
"He's having a seizure! Wedge something in his mouth so he doesn't swallow his tongue!"
As Seen On:
ER, M.A.S.H., Alien
According to Hollywood:
Take Joe Fictional, your average everyday ferret juggler.
One day he is minding his own fictitious business, presumably while juggling ferrets, when he catches a glimpse of a Pokemon episode out of the corner of his eye and goes into a brain-detonating seizure. The people around him have only seconds to force some object, like a wooden spoon or one of his smaller ferrets, into his mouth to keep him from swallowing his own tongue and choking to death.
Joe spasms and struggles, but thanks to the gallant efforts of those around him his airway is kept free from any tongue-shaped obstructions and his life is saved. Except for the whole seizure thing, he might still die from that.
The Wrongness:
While we would all appreciate a good excuse to ram random objects into strangers' mouths, it turns out that it's medically impossible to swallow your own tongue. So all that stuff you did to help that seizing man in Wal-Mart was technically sexual assault.
It's true that a seizure victim's jaw clenches during a seizure, and that could potentially result in some damage to the tongue, but all of that is small potatoes compared to the injury inflicted by pinning the person down and prying their mouths open to shove something between their teeth.
The human jaw is He-Man strong, and when it involuntarily shuts, it can and fucking should remain that way. Trying to force it open can easily cause mechanical damage to the teeth, the gums, the tongue or your own fingers. Worse yet, having a person bite down on something during a seizure can potentially block their airway and suffocate them, which you may remember as the thing you were trying to prevent in the first place.
Really, unless you are a trained EMT the only thing you should do is protect the victim's head and wait for the ambulance to arrive.
"...why are there chunks of ferret in this man's mouth?"
#2.
Stopping Bleeding with a Tourniquet
As Seen On:
M.A.S.H., Die Hard, Jurassic Park, Many Cop Shows
According to Hollywood:
Following TV logic, when someone gets stabbed or shot and starts spraying blood like a soda fountain, the first course of action is to tear off strips of your own shirt and expose a glistening set of abdominal muscles. Next, you take the strips of your shirt and tie them tightly above the leaking wound, producing a make-shift tourniquet that stops the rampant blood flow and keeps the victim alive. If the victim is a blonde, your reward shall be boobies.
The Wrongness:
The problem with using a tourniquet to keep a wound from bleeding out is that cutting off the blood from other parts of the body to the injured area is sort of like blowing up the city's Water Works because you can't get the faucet in your kitchen to stop leaking: It's a bit drastic and someone will probably die because of it.
Applying a tourniquet to a bleeding limb should be the last, most desperate measure you could possibly take. Cutting off circulation to an area of the body can lead to necrotic tissue, a phrase which sounds like "zombie" because it means "your skin dies, rots and has to be amputated." And trust us, no matter how perfectly sculpted your abs might be, causing a girl to lose a body part is pretty much the ultimate turn-off.
The best course of action is to apply pressure directly to the wound with a piece of cloth or gauze while speeding the victim to a goddamn hospital. Tourniquets really only work when you've already lost a body part, because they cut off circulation and therefore keep blood from flowing through your ragged stump and out of your body.
#1.
"He's been shot! We have to get the bullet out!"
As Seen On:
ER, M.A.S.H., Every Action Movie Ever
According to Hollywood:
Watching movies you would think most bullets were full of radioactive poison, seeing as how fast the fictional doctors try to pluck them out. Someone gets shot and before their body even hits the ground, five different medics appear and start digging around the wound before the hero's life can slip away.
The wrongness:
As it turns out, you should leave the bullets where they are. When fired, bullets become very hot, so hot in fact that by the time they lodge themselves deep inside 50 Cent, they are completely sterile and pose no infection risk whatsoever. However they might be pressing on some vital blood vessels which could easily be severed by a removal attempt, and as we pointed out earlier, you kind of need blood to live.
If you don't want bullets floating around inside your body for the rest of your life, you can opt for a procedure to remove them somewhere down the line, but it's rarely an on the spot priority.
Interestingly enough, some scholars believe that both Presidents Garfield and McKinley could have survived their assassinations if the damn doctors hadn't gone poking around in their executive abdomens with dirty instruments and unwashed hands looking for bullets to remove. And when Teddy Roosevelt got shot in the chest he refused to have the piece of metal extracted, a decision which probably saved his life.
The bullet later descended into a third testicle.
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Tourniquets apparently aren't actually that bad - and even if they were, if pressure doesn't work, a lot of people would prefer losing a limb to losing their life - but pressure should indeed be the first thing you try. However, if there's something in the wound, you don't pull it out (see #1), nor should you press on it. In that situation, apply pressure /around/ the wound.
ReplyHow about the lifeguard diving into the pool thing? While I agree not as dramatic, there are reasons guards are trained to JUMP in, not dive. Most drownings happen right where the shallow end starts to slope into deeper water (usually kids who got excited playing and went too deep), not near the diving board (people who know they can't swim generally don't go jump in the deep end). So diving would not be safe for the rescuer. Second, if someone really did run into trouble in the deep water, diving in makes you take your eyes off the victim, and you'll have no idea where they are when you surface and are rubbing the water out of your eyes. Those 10 seconds can count.
ReplyI would like to defend Master and Commander; when Mr. Spoiler got shot and removed the bullet, that would be included in #1. But lead (musket) bullets cause lead poisoning.
ReplyAlso it had carried a chunk of his (almost certainly filthy, given typical conditions at sea in the early 19th century) shirt into the wound. They were more concerned about getting that out than the bullet.
Woah woah woah woah! I'll be forgiving since this was written 2 years ago and the medical field has since changed, but tourniquets really ARE today's life saving procedure. They're only "fatal" to the limb they're placed on after 6 hours, and most medical situations are meant to be taken care of (from time of accident to OR) in less than 10 minutes. Tell me, would you rather risk it taking longer than 6 hours to make it into the operating room, or bleed to death?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesAnd not that it's meant to impress any of you people, this IS coming from someone who got out of training no more than 6 months ago. Now, tourniquets are what you do in 90% of situations that have to do with bleeding, that 10% being head injuries (obviously) and inguinal/axillary injuries, though even the shoulder/groin injuries get a hasty tourniquet until identified as such.
Nowadays we really are trained to slap a tourniquet on anything that looks like it's bleeding more than just a paper cut, and for good reason.
So...the same procedure that was terribly ill-advised two years ago is suddenly "life-saving" today? Did the entire human race suddenly evolve and no-one told me?
You are 100% correct. Thankfully there is someone else here that realized Cracked is wrong. I thought I'd have to post a super long informative thing like you did ^.^
'We could apply a tourniquet to the affected part.'
'Her neck would be favourite, then.'
Daviticus: people did more research on it.
Sure, tell me that making girls lose limbs is a turn-off after i ripped up all my shirts for tourinqets.
ReplyConcerning #2: A better choice for battlefield (read: movie) medicine isn't a tourniquet, but a tamponade with, surprise, a tampon to stop the bleeding.
ReplyOf course, the downside would be that Brick PunchMeat, epitome of manliness, has to jam a goddamn tampon into his gunshot wound, possibly a light shade of pink or a robin's egg blue, possibly with tiny butterfly or flower patterns pressed into the side.
Plus, a bloody tampon, regardless of how it got like that, really just icks everyone out.
Brick PunchMeat, epitome of manliness...I lost it. Damn!
The resuscitation rate for CPR has actually gone up to more like 7% (still not great but a hell of a lot better than 2%) since they changed the breath to compression ratio to 30 compressions to 1 breath.
ReplyThey did change it, and it is getting better. And even then CPR is really just to make sure the guy stays "alive" long enough for the paramedics/AED to get there. While the article is right in saying that people rarely spring back up from CPR, it's robbing it of the justice that it deserves.
They actually changed it yet again. Unless it is a child you don't have to breathe for them. It is just straight compressions now. I think the survival rate is now 10%.
I am an intensive care nurse and out of the many met calls we have only cracked about 5% of peoples ribs. Just sayin'.
ReplyI got the impression that they meant it usually cracks their ribs if you don't know what your doing. I'm a cop and I have had to perform CPR a few times but I never cracked ribs but I have seen people have ribs broken by untrained people trying to help
You are correct that the bones should not break. However in older people the cartilage will crack and that is completely normal.
How about real medical advice from real medical professionals? (And I will say right now that some of these points are entirely right, and some need further explanations)
Reply6) It is true that CPR, by itself, has a very small chance of actually healing someone, that's because it's not meant to. CPR is used to keep someone "alive" long enough for the patient to reach the hospital, where drugs and/or surgery will actually save the patients lives. And yes, part of CPR involves breaking the cartilage that connects the ribs to the sternum.
5) Defibrillators are used to treat this thing called fibrillation. Defibrillators stop fibrillation (where the heart is beating in an unnatural and very very irregular pattern, if you could even call it a pattern) by just stopping the heart. That way, the sinoatrial node can hopefully get the heart back to sinus rhythm.
4) Completely accurate
5) Entirely true. Plus, even holding the head down or the arms and legs down can be dangerous, since during a grand mal seizure, the victim can convulse hard enough that if your grip is tight enough, might break their neck or other bones.
2) Tourniquets are only used as a last resort in emergency situations where the patient faces the choice of either living but losing the limb or dying of blood loss.
1) This is somewhat true. Back then, it was better to leave the bullets in, but now, the bullets are almost always removed, and usually without too much risk, and there isn't too much of a hurry to remove the bullets, except in special circumstances (like a bullet to the spleen or the stomach).
I agree with all your points but #2 ... we are now trained to use tourniquets if simple pressure will not stop the bleeding. They are only dangerous if left on for more than 6 hours and if you are facing that then there are ways to still use it and not risk losing the limb.
When my boyfriend was in middle school, a girl at his school had a seizure and someone shoved a pencil down her throat (point end first) and wound up seriously damaging her tongue...I don't really understand how anyone can every be dumb enough to believe #3, I mean you're tongue's freaking attached to you, you're not going to swallow it.
Reply#3 made me really sad. :/ I hate being epileptic, it f*****g sucks.. And people that don't know how to deal with a seizure could very well kill the person they're trying to take care of. Besides, the thing you really have to worry about is brain damage, lol. Anyways, a lot of this made me giggle..
ReplyTeddy Roosevelt you were one tough son-of-a-bitch.
ReplyHollywood likes to pretend flesh-wounds are harmless let them found out what they really are like.
Reply*Walks into a film-studio lot. Starts shooting directors, actors and scriptwriters through arms and legs. Smiles.*
This is for my buddy John. John Rambo.
" . . .Oh right" i laughed so hard then realised that im in the bank and its dead quiet.
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Here's another common myth from TV/movies (although it doesn't meet the "life-threatening" criteria): People with lacerations in the wilderness who believe they have to immediately sew it closed with dirty fishing hooks and lines, or whatever else is handy. Non-life threatening lacerations should be left just as they are until proper medical care - they can even heal just fine without any intervention (via secondary intention, although it takes longer and leaves a bigger scar). Sewing a dirty wound closed without cleaning it (and in ERs they flush it continuously with sterile saline for a full 15 minutes, among other cleaning measures) will just seal bacteria in their idea of heaven (a nice, warm, enclosed space) which is way more life-threatening than the original cut.
ReplySo basically one of the major points of this article is "being shot in a non-vital area is NOT a flesh wound and you can't just walk around being a badass afterwards... unless you're Teddy Roosevelt."
Reply@TheRevTango I'm going to assume you're a first responder, and not a paramedic.
ReplyActually, he said that about CPR. But CPR in and of itself is not going to bring someone back most likely. Especially not compared to cardiac drugs.
Also, HOW are you getting that paddles will bring someone back after death? Unless you're a paramedic, you're using an AED and those won't even ALLOW you to shock asystole. If you're a paramedic you could use the manual paddles but that's a good way to lose your license. AEDs/Pacing/Manual/anything using electricity for cardiac issues will never be used for asystole. Next time you're first responding, ask the paramedic or EMT if they can or should shock a flatliner, especially one they didn't witness.
Or you know, consult EMS text books.
@Randy1985, are you a paramedic? EMT? First responder? Tourniquets are a last result in most agencies barring one instance: Envenomations, and then it's not a full on tourniquet, but a manual BP cuff inflated to the systolic BP, then lowered around 20. Bite block sure, it's not worthless if you can get it in to prevent them biting their tongue. I have yet to have a seizure that was significant enough to warrant the danger that I could actually get a bite block in what with the clenched jaw and moving about. Always a good thing to try though if you can unless it's an absence seizure.
K bro, so as a certified rescuer. I'm gonna have to tell you, you're full of s**t on the first two. CPR rarely brings anyone back to life; however it has the potential to (at the cost of broken ribs). The purpose is too keep life-giving oxygen circulating through the body especially the brain. A patients survivability increases SUBSTANTIALLY if CPR is administered within the fist 3 minutes of the patient losing consciousness, with diminishing returns every minute after that until the 10 minute mark where we see total brain death. The 10 minute to brain death timeline can be pushed back greatly by administration of CPR. As for defibrillators, they actually can bring you back to life IF YOU HAVEN'T suffered total brain death. All the muscles in the human body are still affected by shock up to several hours after death; this means that you can, in-fact restart a heart by shocking it. The concept works like this. There are two nerves in the hear that pretty much do a little high-five whenever the heart contracts. If you are having an irregular fibrillation like in a heart attack it will disrupt the beat of the heart and you cross your fingers hoping those nerves line up properly. If the heart has stopped entirely the muscles WILL contract when the heart is shocked. And it will hopefully allow the nerves to line up properly again causing a regular fibrillation. PLEASE DO BETTER RESEARCH NEXT TIME!
Replyas well for the seizure by placing something into the person mouth it stops them from bitting and swolling it, as for the Tourniquet yes it does prevent the wound from bleeding more thne it is, this is a good reason why i hardly read this site anymore.
The last one reminds me of a mr. bean movie, when he accidently posses as a doctor a is left alone in the OR, somehow managing to drop an m n m into an open wound...
ReplyWhy did people give than thumbs down? That's awesome! :p
Lol