There's a great study that shows how the "homeboys" driving their buddies to the hospital after gunshot / stabbing trauma have better outcomes than the paramedics because (1) the police mostly delay paramedics' arrival, (2) homeboys are already on the scene, (3) homeboys are faster at getting to the hospital. This is why police are not allowed inside hospitals to interview patients - their loitering outside ERs is barely tolerated by staff in major metros. They harm health outcomes (surprise, surprise).
Is this lack of training? Where were the police earlier, before the gangsters shot each other? There is already evidence they delay care and harm outcomes, and they do not change what they do, so why would they carry life saving devices? They don't, because like with drug addiction, public health isn't commensurable with modern law enforcement.
On the flip side, nobody is really satisfied with the idea that it takes a trauma surgeon to save you. You're right that it takes skills, but not skills that a paramedic, a nurse or many other people have.
>On the flip side, nobody is really satisfied with the idea that it takes a trauma surgeon to save you. You're right that it takes skills, but not skills that a paramedic, a nurse or many other people have.
Although it takes a surgeon to save someone from a serious wound, I am very skeptical of the suggestion (perhaps unintentionally implied?) that an EMT or first responder can't do anything to improve outcomes except transport the patient fast. There is a whole list of things they train combat medics to do and none of them involve an operating theater.
It's possibly outside the scope of their training and just not what they are there for.
This device may be technically cool but simply not practical in application for a long list of reasons. Logistics, what works in practice given humans being human, etc may make this a nice idea in theory but not practice.
Stab wounds are particularly ugly. I used to pay accident claims and our payouts were not designed to adequately address stab wounds. Pay was based on length of the cut requiring sutures and stab wounds are often small in size, may go unsutured while they try to prevent gangrene from taking hold and have various other challenges to both treatment and trying to figure out how to classify them for purposes of trying to pay for the treatment.
I'm sympathetic to the inventors horror at stab wounds but a lot of medical stuff is just not as simple and straight forward as we would like it to be.
I'm not trying discourage the use of this. I have no power to make policy or decisions of that sort. HN is just an online discussion forum and I know something about medical topics and for the conversation to be at all meaningful, you at least need to be talking about what is actually being proposed. I was just trying to nudge the discussion in that direction.
