Seal A Gunshot Wound In 15 Seconds

Simple invention can seal a gunshot wound in just 15 seconds

Thursday, February 13, 2014 by: J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) It is being hailed as breakthrough technology and something that would be especially useful for the military – yet it is a concept so amazingly simple that you may wonder why someone didn’t develop it sooner.

According to Popular Science, one of the most difficult duties on the battlefield is dressing wounds – gunshot wounds, wounds caused by shrapnel, penetrating wounds of varying kinds – in part because it is traumatic and painful for the wounded soldier:

A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn’t always work–if bleeding hasn’t stopped after three minutes of applying direct pressure, the medic must pull out all the gauze and start over again. It’s so painful, “you take the guy’s gun away first,” says former U.S. Army Special Operations medic John Steinbaugh.

Despite this emergency measure, many wounded soldiers bleed to death anyway; blood loss is, as you might have guessed, a major cause of death on the battlefield.

“Gauze bandages just don’t work for anything serious,” Steinbaugh, who treated wounded soldiers during more than a dozen deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, told PopSci.

Tiny little sponges do the trick

After he retired from the military in April 2012 following a head injury, he joined an Oregon-based firm called RevMedx, which comprised a small group of military vets, engineers and scientists who were trying to develop a new method for stopping battlefield blood loss.

The group has managed a success: Recently, the company asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve their pocket-sized invention. Called “XStat,” its developers say the survival rate on the battlefield would be dramatically improved with its use.

Here’s how it works: Medics and other personnel would be able to use the modified syringe to inject specially coated, pellet-sized sponges directly into wounds. Not only could it rapidly stop bleeding, but it would also spare wounded soldiers additional pain by eliminating the need to repeatedly pack wounds.

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