Posted by Lang_Dave on Monday, December 06, 2004 at 6:51AM :
In Reply to: Tragic posted by Mark S. on Saturday, December 04, 2004 at 8:47AM :
From what I can recall the MAST Trousers were a main stay during the Vietnam conflict. The saved many lives but inflating the legs and/or abdomen by pushing blood up into the upper body. The lower body could be deprived (limited) of blood but the upper cannot. Hence when you get to the ER the patient has to have I.V.'s established and the pressure bled off the MAST Trousers gradually. If not the rush of blood to the lower extremites will drop the blood pressure to a very dangerous level and the patient will die due to lack of circulation to the upper body. The fancy word is compartmental voulume depletion. In a crush syndrome situation, all one can do is have a lot of I.V.'s set up (14 to 16 Guage, and don't forget the temperature of the fluid, so you don't send the patient into hypothermia!) and flood the patient during the extracation. Hopefully the compartmental volume depletion will not crash the patient. Mast Trousers here in Virginia are on the way out of favor, although we still carry them on the ambulance. As with EMS everything goes full circle. So in maybe 10 years they will be in favor.
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