An inflatable abdominal tourniquet recently revived two men who were moments away from bleeding to death. The device could have saved three soldiers per month between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. Army says.
On June 7 in Birmingham, Ala., a blood-soaked, unconscious 41-year-old man arrived at a hospital in the passenger seat of a car. The man had lost 75 percent of his blood through two bullet holes in his armpit, and when nurses pulled him from the car at 4:50 p.m., he was less than 5 minutes away from dying.
At 4:53 p.m, a former Army surgeon and inventor named John Croushorn strapped an inflatable tourniquet around the limp man's chest. "We were all covered in blood. The nurse was applying pressure, and I told her to remove her hands," Croushorn tells Popular Science. "She said 'No, blood's just going to go everywhere again.' And I said 'It's okay, you can take your hands away.' So she did, and she was shocked. There wasn't a drop of blood coming out once the tourniquet was on." They rushed the man to the operating room, where a surgeon was able to repair the damage to his arteries.
More @ PopSci
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