- You think shooting a gun is a hair-raising experience? Beth suggests you try trimming a baby's nails. If you can do that, maybe shooting isn't so scary after all!
- What kind of person shoots his girlfriend to death outside of her home? Sean takes a closer look.
- Barron is on assignment this week, but in his place we welcome back Miguel in the inaugural episode of his new segment The Flea Market of Ideas. Miguel talks about less-lethal options for dealing with Antifa mobs.
- In the Main Topic, Sean and Erin commiserate about the total misuse of the phrase "Stand Your Ground" in the media.
- As promised last week, Tiffany tells us all about her trip to Germany to speak before the World Forum on Shooting Activities.
- Last week Erin told you what emergency trauma equipment you'd need to keep people alive until the professional rescuers got there. Well what are you going to do if rescue isn't coming? Listen and find out.
- We give them our tax dollars, but what does NPR do with them? Weer'd shows us that they don't try really hard to be objective.
- And our plug of the week is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, the books that inspired the Russell Crowe movie, "Master and Commander: Far Side of the World."
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Blue Collar Prepping Transcript:
Medical Reference Books
With this weekend being April Fools’ Day, I was going to do a segment on how a folded and strategically placed piece of toilet paper can be a critically important prep when meeting people -- such as for a job interview or on a first date -- but I couldn’t find a way to address the subject in the classy manner you’ve come to expect from GunBlog VarietyCast segments. But if there’s enough interest, I could be persuaded to write it up for my blog. It really IS a very useful prep, despite the questionable taste of the subject matter.
Anyhoo, moving on…
Last week, I talked about what you should have at home to treat a traumatic injury while waiting for the ambulance to show up. But what about if you’re in a disaster situation and emergency services can’t show up? That’s an entirely different set of preps.
Now a lot of people are probably thinking that I’m going to recommend scalpels and suturing kits and skin staplers and those surplus “military” 20-piece surgical kits you find for suspiciously low prices in places like the Bud K catalog.
Yeah…. No. The reason those kits are so cheap is because they’re made with non-surgical steel. This is a bad, BAD thing, because this kind of cheap stainless steel has tiny grooves and trenches in that can trap traces of tissues or fluid, leading to infection if you use them on another patient. They’ve also been known to cause microscopic holes in surgical gloves, leading to infection of the person using them.
So these are bad, bad, bad, things. Do not use them, do not get them, use ONLY surgical grade steel that you KNOW is surgical grade.
As for the other things I mentioned -- they’re great, IF you know how to use them. I’m not going to make product recommendations on that subject because I don’t know how to properly use them, so I don’t know what’s good and what isn’t. I’ll see if I can get an EMT to write a blog article about it.
But here’s what I can recommend: BOOKS. Lots and lots of books, filled with knowledge on what to look for and what to do.
The first book every prepper needs is the Merck Manual of Medical Information. It comes in two versions, the Home Edition - which uses everyday language non-doctors can understand - and the professional version, which is more up to date but has lots of dense medical terms. The professional version is also much more expensive.
This manual is very useful for diagnosing what is wrong with someone based on their symptoms. And it tells you what causes the ailment and how to treat it. Its main drawback is that the treatment advice assumes you have access to modern medicine and equipment, and in a long-term disaster you won’t have access to those.
For that reason, I recommend the “Where There Is No Doctor” series of books. These explain how to treat common maladies and injuries using plain language, lots of illustrations, and the assumption that you don’t have access to first-world medical care but instead must make do with first aid supplies and home remedies. In addition to the first book, subtitled “A Village Health Care Handbook”, there are others that deal with different topics, such “Where there is no dentist” for dental problems; “When There Is No Doctor: Preventive and Emergency Healthcare” for preventive medicine, and “Where Women Have No Doctor” an entire book on healthcare for women’s reproductive health.
Many of these “Where there is no fill in the blank” books are also available in Kindle edition, making them incredibly portable. Buy them, download them to your smart phone or Kindle -- remember, I talked about making a survival e-reader part of your bug-out gear - and keep them handy when you need them.
Gear can be improvised, but knowledge is priceless, so carry as much of it as you can!
- Merck Manual of Medical Information: Second Home Edition - http://amzn.to/2ojJIXm
- Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, 19th Edition - http://amzn.to/2nT4goC
- Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook - http://amzn.to/2ojxm1s
- When There Is No Doctor: Preventive and Emergency Healthcare in Challenging Times - http://amzn.to/2nEomRc
- Where Women Have No Doctor: A Health Guide for Women - http://amzn.to/2nT4ZGg
- Where There Is No Dentist - http://amzn.to/2nnrDTi
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