MEDICAL MONDAY - Dealing with GUNSHOT Wounds w/ Sam Coffman The Herbal Medic

You've just joined the Prepper Broadcasting Network, where we promote self reliance and independents. The views and opinions expressed are strictly those of the host or their guests. Visit us in the interactive chat room at prepper Broadcasting dot com. They want to get the best deals possible on preparedness items locally and online. Check out the American Preppers Network Buyers Club Membership APN Gold. APN Gold members get exclusive benefits, including access to discounts and specials to the best preparedness stores on the web. Say big by getting APN Gold today online at APN goold dot com or dial one two three four Join APN that's one two three four Join APN or APN goold dot com. Hello, this is Sam Coffin with the Human Path at the Humanpath dot com. In the show, I like to help you out with ideas, with concepts, and with information to help you live your life a little more prepared for disaster. Also to help you live your life a little more fully, and to help you be the best possible person even in the worst possible circumstances should those befall us. I am a former Green Beret or special Forces medic from the in the US Army. I have over twenty five years experience both living and teaching survival and survival concepts to civilian and military. I also have over twenty years experience with plant medicine as an herbalist. In today's podcast, I'm going to talk about gunshot wounds. Now, this is a really tough subject, of course, to talk about in a podcast, and certainly, certainly from a medical perspective, there's much more depth necessary to talk about something like this than you could possibly get in a podcast. So don't please don't assume that I'm going to teach you everything there is to know about to reading a gunshot wound in a simple podcast. First of all, this is aimed at people with very little to know medical training. And second of all, is it's aimed towards the situation of not having any kind of higher definitive care or even any kind of higher medical training available. Now, this is again the post disaster, a post collapse type situation is what we're generally talking about here, where you don't necessarily you don't have the luxury of any kind of of a medical clinic or a doctor or even a nurse or anybody with any kind of hire medical training, and yourself or a loved one or a person that's with you gets shot. Because firearms are prevalent, of course in this country, and people are going to have them, and in a post collapse situation where there's no rule of law, you have to assume that gunfights are going to be something that happens. The first rule of thumba Coors is to stay away from gunfights. Don't get in one in the first place. Avoid that at all costs. But if the point that it happens and you don't have it, you don't have a chance or an ability to avoid it, then your second priorities, of course, not to get shot. Now that's difficult. That's like saying, if you're in a knife fight, not to get cut. You know, it's very difficult to be in a you know, a gun fight unless you have absolute tactical superiority and superior training and you're able to overwhelm someone else. But but generally speaking, let's assume again the worst is we always do in my podcast, we try to assume the worst, because if you can deal with the worst, then the rest is, you know, pretty much icing on the cake, right, So we're going to talk about gunshot wounds from a standpoint again of that. So we're not going to be getting into any kind of surgical intervention surgical procedures obviously. First of all, I'm certainly not qualified to talk about that whatsoever. My surgical experience and our experience is either you know, in in assisting or being you know, a kind of surgical procedures is being you know, anything from an R tech to assisting to uh to nothing more than basically basic suturing, basic computations and wound debreadment. From from my standpoint, So although some of those things are actually valid, you know, from the standpoint of a field surgical procedure for a gunshot wound, possibly, uh, they are certainly not something that are valid if we're talking about procedures in the field in the first place, because we have to set up you know, we have to set up a sterile field, we have to actually be able to operate, which is way beyond the scope of an hour podcast. So instead, what we're going to talk about there are first of all, kind of the the so the psychological or the emotional issues that you have to that I think you have to be aware of around an actual gunshot wound, the realities the survival prognosis rate of a gunshot wound depending on where it occurs, I mean in the ords of what part of the body it occurs, and the and the reality body of that and some of those some of those issues, and then we're going to talk about some of the basic first aid all the way to last aid in other words, you know, as a medic, as I always say, you're you're the you're the only medical help maybe for the first few minutes, to the first few hours, to the first few days, to even the first few weeks or months, and there's no higher definitive care during that period of time. So it's you and so what would you do? You know, how would you deal with this? And so we'll try to talk about some of the most practical aspects that I can give you over that over over the hour or so that we're going to be talking. So that's the that's the subject for today. Now, before I get to that, let's go ahead and have a word from our sponsors and we'll come back and we'll get right into it. This program brought to you in part by Airmseeed Banks dot Com, your one stop destination for non hybrid airloom seeds. ALM seed Banks has created a non genetically modified high germination seed bank comprised of thirty three airloom varieties packed for space saving long term storage. Airloom seed Banks dot Com provides a renewable food resource that can produce high protein, new tweet rich fruits and vegetables any survival scenario. Non hybrid seeds will have monetary value rivaling gold and silver during an economic collapse. Protect your friends and family today. Order your non hybrid airloom seed bank at Airloom seed banks dot com. 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Visit us at vacuucana dot com or call us at four seven nine nine nine seven five five eighty three and check out our fall special. Okay, I'm back now. As I mentioned, the first thing I kind of want to start with is more of the psychological aspects, which I think you have to be very aware of, because unless you have a medical background, unless you've seen people bleeding out in front of you, unless you've been in an operating room where somebody dies, or or seeing that you know that type of you know, had that kind of an emotional impact upon yourself of seeing somebody very severely injured that isn't going to make it, then I think you need to think about that a little bit because thinking about it is it's maybe not the same thing and experiencing it physically, but it is better than not thinking about it at all and then being confronted by it. And so what I wanted to say is that depending on the on the caliber of the of the you know, of the bullet that that you're hit with, and depending on the you know, the location on your body that that that a person has struck there are you know, the prognosis can range from decent you know, possibly you know, no problem at all and if possible, recovery all the way to pretty much not gonna make it in the field and again in a non sterile field or post disaster environment, you know. So the first thing, of course, we have to think about right off the bat is the tissue damage, the initial damage that happens on the end side of the body as a as a as a bullet strikes the body, and what happens is of course the bullet go We're assuming most people are wearing clothing, you know, when they're or hitting a place where they're wearing clothing, So all the way from the outer the outer edge of the clothing, the outer surface of the clothing, all the way into the body, every bit of bacterial uh you know, bacteria and infectious you know, pathogenic type type bacteria and organisms that are that are residing on the outside of the body and the bullet are going to make their way not only into the body, but they're going to make their way into the body with great force. So there's not only an impact and initial impact, but there's also a concussive force that goes on inside the body. That is that affects aside from the actual travel of the bullets as it goes through the body. Aside from all of that direct damage, there's also a collateral type of damage that goes on from the shockwave around that bullet as it travels to the body. And that shockwave of course has a radius to it, and so that can damage organs that can that can certainly cause contusions, internal contusions all the way to actually rupturing blood vessels, you know, major blood vessels, even to to fracturing bone and damaging connective tissue and damaging certainly the function of organs themselves, depending on what they are. So obviously, you know this probably goes without saying, but you're much better off your chances, your chances of survival are much better off in this situation if you're shot in an extremity, you know, such as the arm, hand, the leg, or the foot, then they would be if you're shot in the torso or certainly in the head. So these are things to you know, if this is the first thing to just kind of steal yourself to you know, let's say that somebody that's close to you or a family member, they get shot, and they get shot in the abdomen, and they get shot in the chest. You know that that is a four prognosis. If you don't have medical and surgical intervention capabilities, it's a poor prognosis if you don't have the ability to work with pharmaceutical medicines. Now, I give a lot of a podcast about the wonderful attributes and the wonderful help that we can get from herbal medicine, no doubt, and that includes antibacterial And I don't do that because I'm trying to you know, I'm trying to cut down pharmaceutical medicine. I have no problem with pharmaceutical medicine. I have a problem with the system behind it, the for profit system behind it. But man, let me tell you if I got shot by somebody, I would much rather be in a first world hospital to have antibiotics than I would in a situation where I had to use herbal medicine. You know, very very difficult to deal with those kinds with this kind of of an injury, this depth of injury, this depth of infection with herbal medicine. Can it be done, Absolutely, it can be, But is it going to be easy? Probably not, be very difficult, and your chances of survival we're going to be lower than if you had the advantage of having antibiotics and having surgical intervention, of course. So this is why I'm a big fan of integrative medicine. Use the herbs where you can, because there's a lot of places where herbs and plant medicine actually works better than pharmaceutical medicine. Lack of side effects, and more of a holistic approach to health that includes diet and lifestyle and all of that kind of stuff. That is that is more pronounced than you find with with orthodox medicine. Of course, is just part of the history of it, the history of how people work with it, and the actual natural effect of a plant medicine that has thousands of constituents to it, and there are, and it's a natural evolutionary process. Coevolutionary process. We've had with this plant medicine, both as food and as medicine for tens of thousands of years in our bodies know how to work with it, versus a single constituent medicine that has evolved over the last few decades, and our body has absolutely no idea what to do with and so that's why we have so many bad effects, side effects and problems with it. And that's that not you know, that's bad enough by itself, but then the whole for profit system behind it that covers up these kinds of whole of of approaches that we can get to actually cure people, and instead is actually a system to help keep, sorry, keep customers waiting in line, which means we don't want to actually heal everybody. In fact, we don't want anything more than maybe a thirty or forty percent healing rate of people because if we had more than that than we're starting to cut into our profit margin. So that you know, that's the problem that I have with I just want to clear the air there on a little bit. So when we're talking about gunshot wounds. Man, if we have the abay ability to go back and if we've stored up you know, we've got our antibiotics that we've stored up, and we may talk a little bit about that some specifics on that this podcast. If we have time, then that's what we want. That's what we want to be able to go to. Okay, But here's the other end issue of this. This is the emotional kind of preparedness that you have to think have in your mind. There are going to be situations in a post disaster, in a post collapse environment there they are possibly going to be you know, you might possibly be exposed to a situation where the prognosis, without surgical intervention by a trained and very competent surgeon, the prognosis of that person is going to be pretty much they're going to die. It doesn't matter what you do. And even if you had an o R and you were only and a guy and a person got shot in the emergency room, the prognosis might be really bad. You know, So you can't you know, put this blame on yourself. And at the same time, if let's say that you only have a certain amount of pharmaceutical medicine saved up that you've got stored, and now you're faced with somebody that's a loved one or a friend, or maybe just a person that's a friend of a friend, and you've got a community and you can't just you know, you can't just cut that person off. You know, they're important. There's a lot of issues that go along with that socially. If you do that and you know for sure this person isn't even gonna make it, you know, are you going to waste an entire uh, you know, an entire dose of antibiotics and other medications on them, you have to probably you know, I mean people. It's it's sort of like that concept that we have in Western in first world medicine, where you have to be trying to save a person no matter what. You see this a lot with emergency medicine with EMS workers with mts and paramedics on the street. And you know, I've seen this, I've seen this myself where you'll see paramedics that and EMT is doing CPR on somebody, you know, because it's in front of the family and they're doing CPR on a corpse. That's all you know, it's not the guy that the guy or the woman is not coming back, and they know it, but they got to pretend insteady're doing CPR, and they load the person in the back of the of the ambulance and they sit around and basically smoke and joke or you know, don't smoke, but they sit around and joke around and have conversation until they get to the hospital. Doors open and they're doing CPR again. Okay, and you know, don't don't kid yourself. This goes this happens, This goes on, and it's not anything to say there's nothing wrong with the EMS system. You know, people that work in the system tend to get pretty cynical because they see a lot of They see a lot of death, and they see a lot of people who are ungrateful and don't really appreciate what it is that these EMS workers do, how much they put their lives on the line to try to save people in the street. The problem is with society because society doesn't is untrained and doesn't understand this person's dead. You could do CPR in them for the next six hours, it doesn't matter matter. You could get them to the r right now or to the emergency room right now, and we're still not going to pull them back. They're dead, but you know, we have to pretend. And so that's the position that that you know, we've come from from our first world you know environment. So I'm just telling you so if we have you know, it might be different if we were in a post collapse situation that had lasted let's say two years. By that point, the culture will have caught up and people people will have seen other people die enough and will have understood that and become become immune, you know, a sort of sort of inoculated stress, inoculated to that that idea that people just don't make it and that death is something that is going to happen to everybody, and maybe more often in this environment, they're going to be inoculated to that enough to where they understand, yeah, you know what, we're not going to waste waste a regimen of these you know, of our antibiotics, and this person and the person that's injured might be the first one to say, don't waste your drugs on me, you know, but at the beginning, at the beginning, you're going to be faced with a lot of that kind of thing. And again, this is a hypothetical situation. I'm kind of giving you the worst case scenario. It's two or three weeks after complete collapse that's going to last for for a long time. And and here we've got and somebody gets shot. You know, there's people shooting, eat and looting for food and water and medicine all around, and somebody and your crew or you're with your people in your neighborhood or whatever, your group your family gets shot, and they get shot in the gut, and you know they've got you know, they've got you can actually see, you know, some feces and blood oozing out of their of their back, you know, somewhere between their kidneys, and they've got it best. They're going to live maybe twenty four hours. You know. There's no absolutely no reason to give them a bunch of antibiotics. You know. But but that's not the way that we were thinking yet, because we're thinking save them, save them. They're still alive, they're still breeding, they're still talking, you know. So this is what I this is kind of, you know, I think something that you should should really think about. So we're going to talk through some of the different parts of the body to get shot and talk a little bit about the prognosis or rather just you know, what are some of the things that go wrong and what should we be looking for. So hopefully that will kind of help you getting ideas we work from one. Let's start with the with the easiest part of the body, and as I mentioned before, that would be the extremities. So depending on the distance you know that you're that you're that the bullet is before it actually hits the you know, the that part of the body, the extremity, So how much energy is still in that bullet, but the time of that it hits and depending on the the actual caliber of the round and depending on where on the extremity you know it actually hits, a number of things can happen. You know, if you shoot yourself in the foot accidentally with the three oh eight, you're probably pretty much already going to vamputated a good part of your foot, especially you know, the the end of your foot. If you shoot yourself there, that's a lot of that's a lot of energy that you just released into that into that foot. But you know, if you get shot by twenty two from one hundred yards or fifty yards you know, in the hand. Yeah, you know, you're going to be your side of infection is probably going to be our worst issue, going to be our worst problem. You know, you're obviously if it's hit some nerve and connective tissue and bone, and we've got some issues there too, but you're probably going to be We're probably gonna be able to pull through there, even in a field. You know, it's assuming we can deal with the infection issue. So these are things to kind of think about. So the first thing that you should always always consider in a gunshot wound situation is is there an exit wound? So you see an entry wound, immediately look for an exit wound. The location of that exit wound is very important too. So if the location from that X of that exit wound is pretty much opposite or you know, close to being opposite with within a close distance opposite of the entrance wound, then you're probably then then that's a good thing. It's a good thing. But if the if the exit wound, if if if you see an entrance in entry wound in the let's say in the lower right quadrant of the of the gut, you know, and then and you see an exit wound coming out the back that's over on the left side of the body. You know about halfway up the back that that's a bad thing. That means there was a lot of tissue in between there that potentially got damaged. And this can happen because bullets can come in as they as they hit the body, and they can depending on the type of bullet, depending on the velocity, and depending on what they do once they actually hit the type. In other words, you know the type of bullet again, whether they you know, a hallow point for instance, versus you know, versus other types of bullets, what they will do, and how they break apart inside the body, and the route that they might follow if they hit something hard and hard tissue like, for instance, like bone, if they might follow and deflect up that hard tissue and then come out somewhere else. So the best possible Canario scenario we can hope for is, well, the best possible scenario if we're actually hit is somebody's actually hit by a gunshe has a gunshot wound. Is just that it's a grazing wound. There's no worse than getting say a knife flaceration across the shoulder across an extremity or something like that. That's the best case. The next best case would be that there's an entry and an exit wound, and the entry and exit wound is just through soft tissue like a muscle tissue and doesn't hit any vessels, doesn't hit any nerves, doesn't hit any connective tissue. That's good, we can deal with that. The next situation is the same thing, but we're now we're talking about hitting connective tissue under nerve or bone. So in this case, even though we again have a perforating gunshot wound, where there's an entry in an exit wound, there is more damage in between those two wounds. There's more functional damage. If you remember, I think I've talked about this before when I talked about first aid for lacerations or for anything where we actually have an open wound, I talk about the mnemonic as if and there's the F stands for functional or further damage, where we have to explore and find out what kind of further damage there is. So what we're looking for there is we're looking for damages or damage to a blood vessel, you know, major in other words, of major blood blood vessel such as an artery where we actually have internal bleeding that we have to deal with. Is there neural involvement? So do we have you know, issues with with nerves, especially major nerves that that we'd have a you know, problems from functionally from that? Or do we have connection to connective tissue issues you know, ligaments and are intended h and do and or do we have bone involvement as well? And maybe we have all of those things depending on where the but you know, the bullet hits, I mean, imagine at a high velocity, you know, uh, and an the amount of energy that I talked about as the bullet travels through the body. What kind of damage can be done not only from the direct impact, but for for for any shards or pieces of that bullet that might break off, and of course from the concussion force, the the the force of the the shockwave force that passes through the body as well, especially if there's if it's passing through soft tissue or organs. So so, but the next you know, I talked about it being you know, this is sort of on a spectrum of of of disaster, of of medical disaster, and how much you're going to be able to take care of. And so if it's an extremity and we have bone involvement or soft tissue involvement, I'm sorry, connective tissue involvement, or major vessel major blood vessel involvement, and we have to deal with those accordingly. Of course, we would do those the same things that we would do for first aid, which means that if there's bone involvement, we're going to stabilize the you know, the broken bone. We're going to stabilize the joint above and the joint below. We're going to prevent that fracture from further damage, you know, through splinting and bandaging and padding. We are also and restricting the amount of movement that you can make with it. We're going to take care of any kind of bleeding with its arterial or very heavy veinous bleeding by compression, bandage probably you know, and maybe elevation. We're going to take care of any kind of functional damage such as nerve or connective tissue damage by preventing movement, preventing usage of that extremity, and preventing fur their damage. And then, most importantly, more than anything else, we're going to treat for shock so a person's been shot, inevitably they are going to go into shock, and it may be minor, maybe major, but there's going to be a point where the realization that they've been shot catches up. And there's a mental aspect to this, along with the physical aspect of course, where there's loss of blood or whether there it's organ shut down because of organs that have been affected. But the shock is going to set in, and usually it is a mental aspect that hits in first, a psychogenic aspect, as it's called. And so keeping the patient warm, keeping them comfortable, talking to them, reassuring the patient, and letting them know that you are there to help and that they are there are being taken care of, not using trivial statements such as it's going to be okay, everything's going to be fine, things that they won't believe, but rather reassuring them in an honest and sincere manner, making eye contact, communicating, making sure that their needs are met, you know, within within limitations. We'll talk about a few of those limitations, like what you can't do for them depending on where they've been shot. We'll talk about that in a minute. But all of that is extremely important, maybe as important as it is with anything in any kind of injury. Shocks is maybe one of the most important things to deal with in a gunshot wound. So this is I started kind of off with extremity and some and the shock issue, of course extends and becomes a greater, you know, arguably a more important aspect of the injury, the more damaging that the injury is, which means as we move from extremity into the torso of the body, you know, where most of our organs are, or the cervical spine, or the or the the head, as we get an energy injury, injury in any of those areas, and the potential for it being much more damaging starts to increase, and then the need for treating for shock becomes even greater. So let's do that. Let's kind of move to extremities we talked about that. We're just talking about first aid and we're going to get We're going to come back around. This is the first aid aspect. This is the first couple of minutes to the first couple of hours what we're doing on this. We're going to come back around and talk about some of the more long term issues later, but right now we're just trying to stabilize them first aid and if we can get if there is higher medical care, that's what we want to get to. Of course, now we talked a little bit about extremities and gunshot wounds to extremities, Let's talk a little bit. Let's talk more about gunshot wounds to the trunk or the head, the trunk of the body or the head or anywhere where we have organs, organ systems, and we're going to have a lot more damage. Obviously, this is a much more serious situation now. As I mentioned earlier, when I first started this, I think I talked a little bit about the resulting damage that goes along with a bullet with a gunshot wound based upon the force of that bullet traveling through the body. And that is a force that is determined by a lot of different things, most of all are or possibly you know, the most primary physical component of that is the actual speed of the bullet itself. So what this means is that a handgun gun shot generally will not cause as much damage as a high velocity rifle bullet traveling through the body. What happens is the speed increases and we get a you know, a high velocity high you know, a rifle caliber such as a three eight or thirty out six traveling through the body at a very high velocity. Is that it's not just the path of the bullet that's the problem. It's not just the things that are inside you know that the bullet into intersects, you know, physically, but it's also the shockwave that that bullet leaves behind. And so that shockwave, depending on the speed of the bullet, can be huge. You know, it can be twenty or thirty times a diameter of the bullet as it expands and contracts, and as it does that, as you can imagine for me if you were to watch it and very you know, if you've ever seen this. Some of the different experiments done ballistics tests that are done with the high speed camera on are done on what happens when as the bullet travels through gelatine or through some sort of you know, something that duplicates or emulates the tissue of the human body. You'll see that shockwaves slowly expand and then contract, and as it does that, of course, it also creates an actual physical vacuum that pulls in bacteria, and anything that is outside the body that you know, from the outside both the entry and the exit wound, you get bacteria and all that stuff particulate coming into that wound area as well. So we not only have the immediate damage, immediate tissue damage depending on where that bullet is traveling through, depending on the velocity of bullet, and depending on what organ systems is hitting. We also we get the reaction of those things, but we also get the long term damage from bacteria from from massive amounts of bacteria pathogens that have now entered the body. But let's talk about the short term stuff. What the issue is really on that in terms of the of not just the bullet itself and what it's hitting, but also in terms of the shockwave, is how to set the bowl the organ systems are around it to absorbing that shock. So different types of different organ systems will will not necessarily be able to handle that shock, and at the point that they can't, they start to rupture and tear and even burst. This is where, for instance, a head shot, you know, is so damaging because of the brain matter inside, because of the fact that there's nothing but hard tissue or bone and hard tissue around that the brain, and so if there's nothing for the soft tissue on the inside of that the gray matter to be able to push against without actually literally exploding through that hard tissue. So of course it helps, as if any of my podcasts I talk about when I'm talking about you know, medical related medically related subjects, it of course helps you to have some idea of anatomy of the gross anatomy of the human body, so that you know, if there was a high velocity round a hunting rifle or something that you know that a person got shot by and it went through the torso you have a general eye ida based upon the entry wound and perhaps based upon the exit wound as to what organ systems or organs at least are between the entry and the exit wound, or what organ systems may have been affected, if not directly by the path of the trajectory or the trajectory of the bullet rather but have been directed at least by the shock wave that went through the body as well. So if you know if the bullet went through the right upper quadrant approximately of the abdomen, we know that there are you know, the livers in there for instance, and the liver may have been affected by the shockwave, even if it wasn't directly affected. So this kind of course, as I mentioned before, it caused rupturing and caused tearing. It can even cause fracturing of bone. So when we're looking or dealing with somebody who has suffered a high velocity bullet wound, a gunshot wound anywhere on the torso, we need to immediately assume that this is a life threatening injury. It doesn't matter what you might think it presents as or what you might think it was a clean entry and exit wound. It doesn't matter. You assume that this is a life threatening injury. Okay, because of the fact that if not directly, if the bullet didn't directly affect something, certainly the shock wave may have have directly affected that, you know, tissue as I talked about before, bursting, tearing, you know, any number of things, and the two big tissues that we really are are concerned with off the bat right, you know, for immediate issues are going to be bleeding and breathing, depending on where that bullet wound is. Now, if it's if the things that are going to tell us a bleeding problem, because we may not be able to see it. We may not be able to see any kind of bleeding externally because if you think about it, if there's a if there's bleeding in any of the cavities in the torso, they generally are going to stay in the caves. You might not actually have blood get, you know, leaking out of the cavity much. You might not see much bleeding at all, and yet internally you might actually have a huge amount of blood that's being stored in those cavetes. So you're bleeding to death even though it's not visible. So the way that we look at that, or the way that we determine that has to be more through external science and symptoms that the patient would be showing. These symptoms would be things like tachycardia, and it's a really big one. So in other words, to increase in pulse, because if you think about it, the cardiovastrosystem has to pump and work that much harder to be able to profuse tissue. Because there's less volume of blood, there's hypobolimia, and they're going into what we call hypobolemic shock. Gradually. We would have if you had the ability to test the blood pressure we would find that the blood pressure would be dropping. If you were to monitor the patient's mental status, you would see that it was starting to alter. They would start to lose mental faculties to some degree cyanosis, which would mean turning blue kind of bluish tint or bluish color, especially around the lips to begin with. And so these are some of the science that we used to monitor a loss of blood. Okay, so if we're seeing that, especially within the first few minutes, we know there's probably a massive internal hemorrhaging that was caused by this. Now, the other thing that's very that I mentioned it is extremely life threatening is breathing. Depending again on where that bullet wound, you know, penetrated and or perforated the body, It may have affected the diaphragm from the diaphragm on up in terms of breathing, so the diaphragm or the lungs or anywhere anywhere along the airway from upper to lower respiratory, you know, airway, we may have affected that system. The most common system you would probably or the most I'm sorry, the most common issue would probably see would be the chest cavity in the lungs, the plural cavity itself in what we call a pneumothorax or a hemothorax because of the fact that you know, the lungs taking up a large space there, that's probably what you would see. Now, this means basically that the actual cavity, the plural cavity that your lungs are encased inside of. You know, your lungs being empty set acts basically that fill based upon positive and you know, based upon the pressure difference between the outside and the inside of your body. Your lungs don't have a musculature that causes them by themselves to expand or contract. They are expand or contract based upon the space that that expands or contracts, you know, from the diaphragm, the movement of the diaphragm. Now, if that space is compromised, then what happens is the area between where the lungs attached to the the plural you know, the plural wall, that that area becomes compromised and suddenly it gets filled with air or blood or air and blood and it starts to be pushed you know, to the side or pushed pushed in from one direction or another and starts to basically put you know collapse. So that's what we would call a collapse lungs, but it's it's usually gradual process as that cavity starts to fill with air or blood. So here again what we get is a lack of profusion. So we're going to get the same issue. Who is we're going to get tachycardia, We're going to get a lowering of blood pressure. We're going to get a you know, increased anxiety because a person just feels like they're not getting enough air. They may start to try to breathe with auxiliary muscles and start to you know, change their their their position to try to feel like they're getting more air, feel very anxious because they're not getting enough air, showing signs of cyanosis as I mentioned before. The later on we get science called juggular vein distension or JVD, where depending on which side the lung is pushing in on, it actually is starting to occlude the jugular vein and you'll see the jugular vein standing out on one side or another of the neck. We might get what's called tracheal deviation where the trachia actually starts to get pushed to one side because you can imagine the entire plural cavity that's filling up is pushing the lung and everything else over to another the other side of the chest starts to actually move the trachea as well. Again, this is a little further along in the situation. Uh So, these are some of the things that we would see in a chest you know, in a chest injury. So the way that we deal with these now now we talk talk briefly about internal internal bleeding and how you would determine if it was happening. The actual treatment for internal bleeding is very, very difficult to talk about in the first age situation and other of course, it's there's not a lot of things you can do if you're not medically trained and you don't have surgical uh you know, exploratory type capabilities to get in there and actually uh you know a clue the bleeding. There's not a lot you can do with breathing. With a breathing compromise, like I've just talked about, there's a little bit more you can do, at least short term to help that. And one of the first things that you can do is you actually can stop the air from entering that hole. That's been you know this, it's been penetrated into the chest wall, into the plural cavity. And so as you can imagine when you breathe, every time you take a breath, you know, air comes in through your your mouth, through your through your upper respiratory tract, right, and it goes down through your trachea and into your lungs basically through your bronchioles and into your lungs. Well, if you have a hole in your chest cavity that goes into your into your that same parietal or that that same space that your lungs are held in. If you can imagine as your diaphragm moves in your and your and your chest expands wherever that pressure differential exists, it's going to fill any way it can't. So the air is not going to just come in through your mouth. It's also going to come through that hole in your chest. So what you have to do is block up that hole in your chest. And one of the best quick ways to do that is which what's called an inclusive dressing, which is just basically a fancy word for addressing that blocks the air. And what we can use, of course for that would be plastic, So any kind of plastic wrapper on any of your bandages, for instance that you might have in your first aid kit. Uh. You know, they make the vathylene gauze type bandages which you can you can use as well, but you can just basically use plastic, put it over the wound and the chest, the wound on the chest and acclude air from coming in. And normally what's done is what's called the three side of inclusive dressing, which allows air to escape as your chest wall you know, moves as your as your diaphragm moves, and your chest wall expands and contracts, you know, as you're pushing out air. You want air to come out of that space that's been created as well, if you can. You want to try to bleed that air out and get it out of there to to you know, make room for your lung to have room and expand up again. And then anytime that air is trying to come in, you want to suck it down, so it's like a one way valve. So the three side of the eclusive progressing is just a fancy term for a band age for a piece of plastic of a preferably a flexible piece of plastic that will that will stick to your skin, and you know, and do this, and it's taped on three sides. Okay, you're generally speaking. Is taped on the three sides, the upper and the two sides, and then the lower is left open and so that allows again the air to flow out. Okay, this is not the only treatment for this, it's just the initial treatment. Now, if you have a perforating gunshot wound that goes through the front, the first thing you do is, as I mentioned, if you see a gunshot wound as you check for an exit wound immediately. So if a person got shot in the chest and they're lying on their back and you're looking at them and you see a hole in their chest, or you see a hole maybe in their shirt, and you see some you know, maybe some frothy, kind of a bubbly looking pinkish blood around that that's kind of seeping out, then you know you've got they got shot in the chest, and you know that probably the airway is affected, the breathing is affected, you know, And so the first thing you need to do is to aside from stopping that hole and stopping air from getting that hole, is also to roll them and look at the back and see if there's an exit wound, and if there is, you need to occlude that as well. Now on the back you just put a foresight of ecclusive dressing, which can just be a piece of plastic all taped all the way around. You don't have time for that right off the bat, so just any kind of plastic would work. If you have an mre container or a bandage or you know, a cravat, you know, a triangular bandage in a plastic wrap or something that will acclude that. You can just put that on underneath it and roll them back over the top. Their body weight keeps the plastic, you know, keeps the air from coming in at all on the back because you're going to be working on them from the front. So you put the three sided on the front and put the four sided on the back and you can get back to it later and tape, you know, tape an actual bandage down, but to begin with, just get something over covering that hole so that there's no air coming in from the back. This is if, again, if there was a perforating wound through the chest, through the chest cavity. So this is how we This is an initial first aid for this, and again there's more that we can do there. There are there are some other terms and I'm not going to get into there's not time and certainly there isn't really it's it's beyond the scope of any podcast I think to talk about things like a needle thorce and tsis and certainly beyond what would happen in the surgical capacity, which would be a chess tube to be able to actually drain the fluid or the air out of that. Now, positioning can help to some degree too, and that is if you know it's pneumothorax you know it's just air in there, that you position them so that air is up, and if it's ahemothoraxs you position them so the blood is down, so that would be side to side probably. However, determining whether between you whether you have air or blood and that chess cavity is difficult to do and requires you know, in the field. The best you can really do is what we call percussing to see if there's this, you know, a difference in sound as you move up the chess wall, and that's very difficult to do, even with training. It's difficult to do let alone. If you actually have you know, ambient sound around you that's going on, and people are shouting or screaming or there's noise, you're never going to hear that. So that's kind of beyond the scope of what we're talking about too. It's one of those things. It's kind of a nice deal if you can do it, but you're probably not going to be able to do it. So that's the initial first aid. This This is as you can tell, as I talked to when I started as podcast off, I told you you know, this is really this is a topic that does not necessarily have a happy ending to it. There's not You can't just expect to wade into a gunshot wound in a post disaster environment with no higher definitive care, no trained surgeons, no trained doctors, no pharmaceutical medicines, no clinic, no no sterile field to be able to operate in. Even if you didn't have those other things and you were just you know, kind of working on the fly, which you could do. You know, just if you if you see a bleed, you know you're you're you're clamping it off and anybody can do that with common sense to some degree. If you have none of those things available to you, this is a losing battle, you know. And this is this is really the mental side of it. And I'm not telling you this to get you depressed or get you discouraged, but you know, I just think you have to be very realistic if you are a preparas to thinking about some of these things through, and if you think them through ahead of time, it's less difficult to deal with them later, and it's easier to make decisions that might be difficult decisions if you've already thought them through to some degree. So so be thinking about that a little bit that you know, there's just not necessarily going to always be an easy answer and a happy ending if somebody gets shot with a high velocity round through the gut or through the chest, you know, because now what's on the tail end of this, of course, assuming that we stop the bleeding, or assuming that we actually take care of a chest of you know, of a pneumothorax or a hemothorax, and we're probably not going to be able to fix it completely, but let's assume that we did, or even a diaphragmatic rupture or something like that. It was small enough, minor enough, the person was young and strong enough, and their body was amazing, and we actually had even some of the right herbs to be able to help and you know, pull it for a tissue and help that healing, and they actually healed up from it. We still have to deal with on the other end of this, we have to deal with infection, and the infection is a big deal. Now, some of you have listened to my other podcasts, and I have lots of information on there about antibacterial herbs, how they work. It's you know, it's limited to what I can possibly talk about in an hour on a podcast, but still that gives you some of the ideas, so you can go back to those and listen to some of the different antibacterial herbs if we don't have pharmaceuticals, and the dosages on there are just huge. You know, you just basically give people gigantic dosages of this really until you start to get side effects from the herbs, which you certainly can get, and then you back off a little bit and you keep them that keep them those dosages. And what we're trying to do there is we're not just giving them antibacterials, but we're also giving them really intense stimulants to their own immune system. We're boosting that. We're doing everything to help their body, of course, heal it self, which is what our body does anyway, whether we're giving them pharmaceuticals or not, it's really up to the person's body and the person as to whether or not they heal. It doesn't matter how much of an amazing surgeon you are. If it weren't for the fact that the body could heal, you'd be nothing more than a serial killer. Right, So you cut somebody open, if their body wasn't willing to heal, you would be killing them. So we have to remember that. And it's the same with herbal medicine of course as well. It's just that there's a much more gentle approach and it's not, you know, depending on the IRBs we're using. And certainly the harder part of this is determining what the dosage would be because herbs vary from plant to plant, from season to season, and from how they're prepared and dried and all that kind of stuff. So we have to be thinking about antibacterials, we have to be thinking about infection and drawing that infection out. One of our most useful tools in that in our first aid kit for that would be charcoal. Activated charcoal, you know, USP grade or food grade is best if we can get it to be able to draw infection out, if that infection is close enough to the surface of the skin to where we can actually you get an interaction between the infection and the charcoal. You think of charcoal is really something nothing more than a very very fine and delicate sponge. It's a sponge that you can use to pull out some of the finest bacteria and clean and wound out really really well. But it's not necessarily going to do much beyond that. It's certainly not a tissue proliferent. It's not an antibacterial necessarily. It's just a cleaner. It just pulls that bacteria out, and it pulls it out anywhere it touches it. So it's a very useful tool, but it's a tool that we use at the very beginning of an infection generally, I mean at the very beginning of the treatment of an infection. We've cleaned it out, then we can start to use our herbs on it. Okay, so I don't know if I mentioned that I was going to talk about herbs or not. I'm getting close to the end of this podcast, and so I don't think I'm going to at this point go into specifics on herbs. I've talked about that again and other podcasts. In terms of bacterial infections, I would like to talk about wound healing and herbs, and I think I'm going to save that for another podcast, and maybe one i'll do real soon, in fact, maybe next week, and to talk a little bit about how tissue grows and how we can increase our ability to heal and minimize infection and maximize minimize inflammation, minimize infection and maximize tissue growth and healing by using some of these herbs that really increase our body's ability to do that. They increase microcirculation and they do things like that, and those are important nerves also because really as important as as you know, the kind of the Western Orthodox viewpoint on infection is take anti antibiotics in order to just nuke all bacteria, and it nukes. Of course, there's a lot less of the infectious and pathogenic bacteria as there are the millions of different species of regular non pathogenic bacteria in our body, and in an infection, you know that that percentage grows from maybe less than five percent to up to five point one percent or something. You know, it's very very minimal amount of growth, but you know that shows you on what a fine line our bodies function, right, I mean, how sensitive that balance is. And so that's the Western Orthodox approach, whereas from the herbal approach, although we can do that, we can't do that nearly as efficiently as we can or as not necessarily efficiently, but we can't do that as severely as we can with a single constituent pharmaceutical drug. So instead, what we do is we support the body. We kind of go at it from the other side, and we say, well, let's help the body do what it does best by supporting that tissue and helping the tissue proliferate, helping the tissue, you know, recreate micro circulation and get rid of all the toxins because that's what that micro circulation does, and of course give some anti bacterial support there too. So that's kind of the approach from that, and that would be the approach you would take also from something like for something like a gunshot and once you got past the initial first aid and the initial you know, life threatening injuries, we would start working towards repairing that tissue, supporting the tissue and of course giving as much anti bacterial support or antipathogenic bacterial support as we could too to help you know, the infection. But it's a big task. You know, this is not this is not something to take lightly or to be cavalier about, or to think, you know, we'll just use herbs, herbal medicine in this. You know, I never have claimed and I and I never will claim that herbal medicine is an adequate substitution as we get into the critical care and and trauma care and that type of thing. You know, I've off I've always said this, you know, if I get shot by by by if I get shot, or if I get hit by a bus or or whatever, you know, I want, I want our you know, American emergency rooms and our American emergency pians who are, in my opinion, to find its trained in the world. And I want that kind of care if I have a choice. But if I don't have a choice, you know, that's what my school's all about. What if I don't have a choice, then what do we do? You know, how can we deal with that? So taking away that factor of just you know, thinking we can always fall back on, you know, that kind of care instead having something else as a backup. So this is not you know, it's not the alternative that you want, but it's the alternative that you may be forced to have. And so that's what that's what the purpose of this podcast was. So I apologize that this seemed like it was kind of a depressing podcast and one that doesn't leave you feeling like you're in complete control and able to deal with any situation that comes your way. But you know, I think it's important to be very realistic about what this kind of trauma means. And one of the biggest issues again I'll kind of close by saying, is that in herbal medicine, we just don't have the practice. We don't have the ability to practice. I mean, how many herbal clinics do you know that are set upon war zones where that that's what we're using. Can't We don't even have herbal clinics that are set up really in any kind of number to be able to gather data for just basic you know, chronic issues that you normally see in a heerbo clinic. And I'll tell you the kind of people that I get a my erbo clinic is people who are have tried everything else and it's failed, and they're willing to do anything. They're willing to try anything for whatever their health problem is. These are people who are ready for herbal medicine. They don't care. They will actually be compliant. They'll take the herbs, they'll take, they'll change their diet, they'll change their lifestyle, and guess what, they almost always walk away with a cure. You know, they walk away and they say, oh my god, this stuff really works. Well. The reason it works is because, you know, we looked at it from a whole perspective, and herbs absolutely, of course they work. If they didn't work, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be doing what they're doing and spending the billions of dollars of research that they are to try to find new medicines from plants. In fact, all of our medicines do in one way or another, At some point the idea for it or the actual original compound for it came from a plant period. So you know, in terms of medicines of over of pharmaceutical medicine, pharmaceutical manufactured medicine. So you know, it's it's those kinds of people that come into the clinic that are that are that are helped by by herbal medicine that it works for. But my point to all of this was that I'm just a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket, and if you put all the herbal clinics across the country together, we're just a tiny drop in the bucket in regards to the number the thousands of the millions of people seeking healthcare. So what that means is we just don't have the data. We don't have the empirical data to be able to say, yes, this always works for this particular condition, or this works you know better for this kind of a person in this kind of a condition, and you know that that kind of data is missing, and we don't have residency programs, and we don't have you know, we don't have that ability to get that kind of experience because the system has stacked the deck against us, and instead of being the people medicine that's out there that's available for everybody like it should be, as is our constitutional right, instead what we have is we have a profit based you know, corporate oligarchy that provides over the distribution of profit based medicine. And that's what it's all about. And I'm not going to get into that soapbox, you know, I think I've been there a little bit, but I'm not going to go there now. But I just wanted to say that that's why, you know, I'm only able to give a certain amount of data out really because I don't have all the data that I would like to have. And so my entire life as an herbalist, you know, anything I spent doing about an herbalist, most of it is spent researching other people's experience, going over my own notes, gathering my own experience, looking at ethnobotanical data from historical and historical herbal data from eclectic physicians, for instance, back in the in the eighteen hundreds, from the nineteenth century, when they were actually logging and cataloging this information and putting that all together, compiling that together, and then actually you know, using that when I have a chance to use it, and that is using with with with a person who comes in who is ready to actually use it and actually comply and actually you work with the herbs, that's a lot of if that's a lot of steps to take to be able to verify that this particular plant works a certain way. So, you know, with all of that said, you know, this is why this is kind of my long disclaimer and my long excuse here, my long winded excuse as to why I am unable to give you as much data as I would like to, and not just you, but anybody in any of my classes. And I hope that situation changes. I mean, that's really what my whole nonprofit herbal Medics is all about, is trying to create an open you know environment, an open forum, an actual live forum and experientially based forum for integrative medicine to create to start to be born, you know, between doctors of all types of all specialties and plant medicine, you know, herbalis and to be able to work side by side and see that some things work better to work with you know, plant medicine just plain works better. And there's some natural therapies that just plane work better, there's no question about that. And then there are some therapies and there are some there are some issues that need to be solved using surgery. There are some things that absolutely have to have pharmaceutical medicine, so you know, that's my goal is to be able to create that kind of environment and at that point then I think we'll be able to have a lot more data coming in as well. You know, if we ever reached that point, and I don't think we will before we break down, but if we do, then that's a good thing. So it's always good to have something positive going on as well as you know, thinking about the worst case scenario too. All right, so that's been my podcast for night. I hope you hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for listening, and until next week. This has done, Sam Coffin goodbye. Today's broadcast has come to you through the courtesy of the Prepper Broadcasting Network. See our hosts, show schedules, and archive programs and more at prepper broadcasting dot com. Thanks for listening.