U.S. Military use of tourniquets from 2001 to 2010.

The Return of Tourniquets

Uncontrolled hemorrhage from isolated penetrating extremity wounds can result in 100% mortality, but significant controversy still surrounds tourniquet use in civilian prehospital care. It’s been proposed that 10% of combat deaths in the Vietnam War resulted from uncontrolled hemorrhage from extremity wounds; many of the deaths were due solely to ineffective field hemorrhage control methods.1 M...

Battlefield Tourniquets: Lessons Learned in Moving Current Care Toward Best Care in an Army Medical Department at War.

Bleeding prevention and control by tourniquet use by out-of-hospital caregivers is a major breakthrough in military medicine of current wars. The present review documents developments in tourniquet practices since 2001 among the US military services for aid in improving doctrine, policy, and especially care in wars to come. Tourniquets are an adjunct for resuscitation in self-care and buddy aid...

Military history of increasing survival: The U.S. military experience with tourniquets and hemostatic dressings in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

The military emergency tourniquet program's lessons learned with devices and designs.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to report the device lessons learned from an emergency tourniquet program and, in particular, to emphasize analysis of discarded devices recovered after clinical use. METHODS Discarded tourniquet devices were analyzed after use in emergency care of war casualties to determine wear and tear patterns, effectiveness rates, and associations among device desi...

Analysis of recovered tourniquets from casualties of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation New Dawn.

BACKGROUND Tourniquet use recently became common in war, but knowledge gaps remain regarding analysis of recovered devices. The purpose of this study was to analyze tourniquets to identify opportunities for improved training. METHODS We analyzed tourniquets recovered from deceased service members serving in support of recent combat operations by a team at Dover Air Force Base from 2010 to 201...