and you must practice proper sanitation techniques
When a hospital that is supposedly a sterile environment still has a far number of infections post surgical, how is it going to be possible for an untrained person to create a sterile environment out in the field?
Considering that
most suturing jobs are cosmetic, I am trying to understand what kind of wounds cannot be closed with just Tincture of Benzion and steri strips. If you suture closed a gaping wound in the field and you are very likely to close in an infection. If the infection cannot release itself to the outside (because of your excellent suturing job) it may very likely go inwards. It can easily become systemic and this is a recipe for a disaster. If that happens you better know what you are looking at and know what to do or you may likely have killed someone because they had a non-life threatening cut that you turned into death because of your illegal surgery. Try explaining this to his/her significant other, the police, the coroner, a jury etc. Imagine all the hearings you will be invited to.
If instead you use steri strips and the wound becomes infected it will ooze like a wound should that isn't cleaned properly, and it is very unlikely that you will be able to irrigate a wound properly in the field so again it will get infected. I will relay what a doctor once told me. He told me back at the turn of the 19th century a doctor did what was later referred to by medical students as the dog shit experiments. They cut 20 dogs and took shit and spread it in all 20 wounds. 10 they sutured closed and the other 10 they left open. All 10 closed wounds became seriously infected and some of the dogs died. The 10 open wounds all healed without a major infection. I’ll say it once more. Most suture jobs that don’t involve tendon injury or something like that are superficial and probably not needed at all except for cosmetics. This is what the doctor in charge of the medical training program for the wilderness EMT course had to say on the subject. Not me.
I won't go into things like "standard of care” and “who was your medical control, etc when you started to act like a doctor. I will say that even if you are successful and don't make things worse you are very likely setting yourself up for a lawsuit and/or arrest. Most everyone in almost every state in the country (46 at last count if I remember correctly) is covered by the Good Samaritan laws of that state. They are almost universally the same in every state that has one. Basically, you are protected from a lawsuit if what you do, medically, to help someone, doesn't exceed your level of training even if that person dies, even if you made mistakes, provided what you did wrong didn’t rise to the level of wanton carelessness. I.e. if you are trained in first aid and you apply a Band-Aid to what a reasonable person would consider a minor wound after cleaning the wound on that person and then they later lost the arm do to infection you very likely would be protected from a viable lawsuit. You start doing CPR on a heart attack patient because that is what you were trained to do. But when he doesn’t revive you start whacking away at him with your Leatherman to do open heart surgery on him because you saw it on ER, because “what the hell, he was going to die anyway, what could it hurt?” you will find yourself in serious trouble. Anyone dispute this? I know this is on the extreme end of the spectrum but that is how it will be looked at. And this is if you actually saved the guy. Criminal charges of assault or attempted murder. Civil charges trying to take everything that you own.
a few months back a backpacker came in to a local trauma center that i was at and the doctor said the only reason he was still alive was self surgery.
I really want to know what this was. I'm not being a wise guy. I really want to know the situation. Also let’s be very clear on the difference in doing something to yourself and "helping" someone else with your medical skills that you actually don’t have legally.
KR
