Prehospital and Retrieval Medicine – THE PHARM dedicated to the memory of Dr John Hinds

This is part 2 of a series (part 1 is here) on trying to study near-infrared spectroscopy in the prehospital setting by Dr Andrew Weatherall (@AndyDW_). Can NIRS work? No one can be sure but here’s one approach to getting some data we can actually use. 

A while back I did a post where I pointed out that when you get sold technology, there’s a whole history behind the machine that goes beep that means it’s probably not what you’re told. And the example I used was near-infrared spectroscopy tissue oximetry.

That was partly because I’m involved in research on NIRS monitoring and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at it.  Like every time I look carefully in the mirror, there’s a lot of blemishes that I miss on a casual glance. I also don’t mind pointing out those blemishes.

So that post was about all the things that…

We all want to stop bleeding. Here’s a quick review from Dr Alan Garner of a paper coming out of Iran that looks at haemostatic dressings. 

Hatamabadi HR et al. Celox-Coated Gauze for the Treatment of Civilian Penetrating Trauma: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Trauma Monthly. 2014;20:e23862. dii: 10.5812/traumamon.23862

There is not a lot of data on haemostatic dressings in the civilian context and human data from the military context is not randomised for obvious reasons. It is therefore nice to see a RCT on this subject in humans. In the study they compare the time to haemorrhage control and amount of haemorrhage in stab wounds to the limbs between 80 patients treated with Celox gauze versus 80 patients treated with normal gauze.

The study is from an emergency department in Tehran and is pragmatic in design. There are some limitations of the study worth mentioning. It was open label, and…