The Bind About Pelvic Binders – Part 4

Is this the last bit for now? Dr Alan Garner following up on pelvic binders after all the stimulating comments. If you haven’t already, check out part 1, part 2 and part 3.

During the writing of part three of this series on pelvic fractures and particularly after reading Julian Cooper’s comments (thank you Julian) I realised that the observational data around pelvic binders does not entirely fit with the theories. Let’s start with the theory and I might directly borrow Julian’s comments from Part 2 as he says it better than I could:

“In any type of pelvic injury. the bleeding will be either:

1. Venous or bone ends: in which case keeping things still with a binder is likely to allow clot formation (low pressure bleeding, low or high flow).
2. “Slow” arterial (the sort of thing seen as a blush on contrast CT) which will probably trickle on…