Who knew these things could have so many uses in a survival situation? Yes, That?s a Tampon in My Mouth: The Swiss Army Survival Tampon — 10 Survival Uses | The Art of Manliness
The web article is a demonstration of the fact that many mundane things have the potential for multiple uses. The art is in thinking laterally in identifying what needs can be met by using something in ways that the item was not originally conceived nor designed to be used for. This is a useful survival thought experiment that would be worth exercising one's imagination with, either solo...or with a group of people using a number of common household items...or even the detritus found discarded along the side of a stretch of road. Although many have argued that tampons and sanitary pads could be used as improvised dressings, arguing that their absorbant qualities make them ideal for dealing with haemorraging, however there has been some criticism of this intuitive usage of tampons. Some argue that you want a dressing to promote clotting which helps in sealing the the wound and minimising loss of fluids. Apparently gauze wound dressings perform this function more effectively than tampons and sanitary pads. Tampons by their design draw fluids away from the surfaces that they have contact with, which would tend to actually impede clotting at the wound site; the clotting being done predominantly inside the tampon itself. Where tampons and sanitary pads may come in useful is in protecting the wound from abrasion and offering some protection against contamination by surfaces that are possibly more contaminated than the tampon or sanitary pad, which itself is not sterile as such. I am not suggesting that sanitary pads and tampons are utterly useless as improvised dressings...just that one needs to be aware of their limitations, and not rely on them in lieu of a proper FAK.
