Dignity Health
Dignity Health

The vital reason these medical professionals want to teach you how to use a tourniquet.

Ally Hirschlag
03.15.18

On Oct. 1, 2017, in Las Vegas, 59 people were killed and over 500 more were injured in a mass shooting. It was devastating, but that didn't stop people from trying to help.

"People were calling nonstop to our ER, and I'm sure every other ER, asking if they could show up and donate blood," recalls Carolyn Smith, an ER trauma nurse at Dignity Health in Henderson, Nevada. "People were showing up at the door to donate blood at 2 in the morning."

Photo by Master Sgt. Patricia F. Moran/U.S. Air National Guard.

Smith has been a first responder on the scene at many disasters, both natural and human-caused. One thing she's noticed is that there are often countless people who want to offer their assistance. This was especially apparent in Houston after Hurricane Harvey.

"It was a very humbling experience to see people, not only in Houston, but from all over the state, coming to help no matter what color, what race, what religion, what tax bracket," she recalls.

Obviously giving blood after one of these tragedies is helpful, but what about in the immediate aftermath of something like a shooting? What can you do if someone is actually bleeding out in front of you?

It's easy to feel helpless in the presence of such a situation, but it's in those precise moments that you can be the most helpful.

There are simple steps you can take to try to save someone's life if they're bleeding uncontrollably. They just require some know-how.

This graphic comes from a program called "Stop the Bleed," which was launched after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. It's designed to teach people the basic skills needed to stop a serious bleed from becoming life-threatening.

"They found that there were a significant number of what we call 'preventable deaths' [at Sandy Hook]," explains Dr. Sean Dort, a surgeon at Dignity Health. "If somebody knew the skills we're teaching, they would've been able to save lives."

The free Stop the Bleed program offers explicit guides to help prepare civilians to act in a situation where someone is bleeding profusely. You can also access free bleeding control classes in every state, where trained professionals teach you how to properly put on a tourniquet and pack a wound.

Teachers regularly oversee classes at capacity, which makes sense given that 2017 saw more mass shootings than any other year in modern U.S. history. Gun-shot wounds have become far too commonplace, and people seem to be tired of feeling helpless in the face of them.

A woman putting a tourniquet on a practice dummy. Photo via Dignity Health.

Medical professionals like Smith and Dort hope this impulse to be prepared will be a trend that continues.

"We need to embed [bleeding control] into the American subconscious the way CPR is," says Dort.

If bleeding control was taught, alongside CPR, in schools across the country, kids would head into adulthood armed with two vital sets of lifesaving skills. As a result, future mass shootings and other catastrophic events may not be nearly so devastating.

The more people on the scene equipped to stop bleeding, the better chance victims have of surviving until medical professionals can get to them.

It could be the difference between giving over to panic and turning a potentially bleak situation around.

For more information on how to stop bleeding, check out the video below:

cpr mass shootings first aid stop the bleed stop bleeding
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Dignity Health

Breaking down the conspiracy theory mindset at the heart of climate change denial

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Climate change is happening because the earth is warming at an accelerated rate, a significant portion of that acceleration is due to human activity, and not taking measures to mitigate it will have disastrous consequences for life as we know it.

In other words: Earth is heating up, it's kinda our fault, and if we don't fix it, we're screwed.

This is the consensus of the vast majority of the world's scientists who study such things for a living. Case closed. End of story.

How do we know this to be true? Because pretty much every reputable scientific organization on the planet has examined and endorsed these conclusions. Thousands of climate studies have been done, and multiple peer-reviewed studies have been done on those studies, showing that somewhere between 84 and 97 percent of active climate science experts support these conclusions. In fact, the majority of those studies put the consensus well above 90%.

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Little did he know that she would successfully become all three: an award-winning biomedical and mechanical engineer who performs cutting-edge medical research and has started multiple companies.

Bhatia holds an M.D. from Harvard University, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a PhD in biomedical engineering from MIT. Bhatia, a Wilson professor of engineering at MIT, is currently serving as director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, where she's working on nanotechnology targeting enzymes in cancer cells. This would allow cancer screenings to be done with a simple urine test.

Bhatia owes much of her impressive career to her family. Her parents were refugees who met in graduate school in India; in fact, she says her mom was the first woman to earn an MBA in the country. The couple immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s, started a family, and worked hard to give their two daughters the best opportunities.

"They made enormous sacrifices to pick a town with great public schools and really push us to excel the whole way," Bhatia says. "They really believed in us, but they expected excellence. The story I like to tell about my dad is like, if you brought home a 96 on a math test, the response would be, 'What'd you get wrong?'"

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In our family, if someone accidentally eats something they shouldn't, it's mainly a bit of inconvenient discomfort. For those with truly life-threatening food allergies, the stakes are much higher.

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Axel was "super excited" waiting for the bus in Augusta with his mom, Amy Johnson, until it came time to actually get on.

"He was all smiles when he saw me around the corner and I started to slow down and that's when you could see his face start to change," his bus driver, Isabel "Izzy" Lane, told WEAU.

The scared boy wouldn't get on the bus without help from his mom, so she picked him up and carried him aboard, trying to give him a pep talk.

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