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Beyond the IFAK: Home Medical Gear
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Beyond the IFAK: Home Medical Gear
The IFAK (individual first aid kit) has become extremely popular. A number of companies sell purpose-built, military-style IFAKs for civilian use. Many more sell IFAK components. Numerous methods of carry, including wallet kits and ankle rigs have proliferated. I think that’s fantastic. Unfortunately I think the twin Gospels of the Tourniquet and the IFAK aren’t the end of the story as far as first aid for the well-prepared is concerned.To get more news about quick clot combat gauze, you can visit rusuntacmed.com official website.
Nothing I say in this article should be construed as medical advice. I’m just some dude on the internet. I’m not a doctor, I’m not qualified to teach anything medical, and I’m not telling you how to treat anything. Descriptions of tools here are merely that, not instructions on how to use them. I’m certainly not telling you to forgo medical providers and practice DIY medicine – if you need emergency medical services, a doctor, or the support of a hospital, you should seek those things out.
But as adults we all realize that sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes we have to rely on ourselves, no matter how much we might want or how hard we might seek a healthcare professional. This article merely covers the baseline equipment I would want to have on hand for such an emergency.Also please note that equipment is almost worthless without training. More importantly, the equipment mentioned here can be dangerous if used incorrectly. I will repeat this over and over again in this article, but you need to seek medical training. Even if you completely ignore my equipment advice, please seek high quality medical training.The IFAK as we know it was designed for use on the battlefield. The core components of the basic IFAK are the tourniquet, the battle dressing, an occlusive dressing, and perhaps a hemostatic agent. An expanded IFAK may have a couple of other respiratory/airway interventions such as a nasopharyngeal airway (NPA) device, and a catheter for performing a needle decompression. The design and inclusion of these tools in the IFAK was a direct response to battlefield mechanisms of injury.
The battlefield dressing and tourniquet were fielded to deal with preventable exsanguination (bleeding out) from extremity wounds. Since the advent of ubiquitous body armor and effective helmets, wounds that normally would have been suffered by vital organs and were now stopped by the armor. This meant an increase in deaths from extremity wounds, an insult that the tourniquet has been incredibly effective at preventing.
Widespread fielding of hemostatic agents was intended to deal with hemorrhage in junctional areas, the high-femoral bleed made famous by the film Blackhawk Down. The chest seal was designed to deal with punctures to the thoracic cavity, preventing death from tension pneumothorax. Finally, nasopharyngeal airways and decompression needles gave soldiers the ability to deal with some other respiratory problems common to battlefield injuries. The NPA maintained airway patency while the needle could relieve a tension preumothorax.
The IFAK has saved untold thousands of lives on the battlefield. Without a doubt the IFAK – or selectively carried IFAK components like the tourniquet – have saved quite a few lives in non-military contexts, as well. But it’s not a perfect model and it’s not the last word in medical components for those seeking to be prepared against whatever may come. There are two problems with the IFAK model.The first is that the injuries covered by the IFAK are very limited in scope. The IFAK is heavily geared toward trauma, specifically battlefield trauma. This makes sense considering it was developed by the military. Unfortunately the IFAK and “combat trauma”-oriented classes completely fail to address many injuries, illnesses, and insults that are massively more common than gunshots or roadside bombs.
CPR is an awesome example: CPR is not taught in Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC). This makes sense; cardiac arrest caused by traumatic injury or hypovolemia secondary to trauma is not generally correctable with CPR. Even it if were, CPR is impractical on the battlefield, and takes soldiers’ focus away from their primary task: returning fire. I think this has made CPR sort of “uncool” and overlooked, but high-quality CPR saves countless lives. When your parent, spouse, or child goes into respiratory distress it won’t matter that the “cool guys” don’t worry about CPR.
Second, the IFAK is heavily geared toward treating very healthy, military-aged personnel. This ignores a huge swath of the population: pediatrics and older adults. Even if you aren’t a healthcare provider, my guess is that there are some pediatrics and geriatrics in your life that you care about. The problems they are mostly likely to suffer probably aren’t traumatic amputations or, gunshots, or blast injuries.
Third, IFAK components are designed to be as compact and lightweight as possible. That excludes a lot of other really important equipment that, again, you’re probably more likely to need than a tourniquet. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have the components of an IFAK, but you also shouldn’t stop there. In a home first aid kit you are unconstrained by size, so use that to your advantage. Sometimes bulkier, heavier, non-IFAK items are cheaper just because they don’t have to be designed to withstand daily carry by a soldier.