........................................................... The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared the use of the XSTAT 30—an innovative sponge-filled gunshot wound dressing device—for use in the general population. Approved last year for battlefield use, the device can plug a gunshot wound in just 15 seconds. The XSTAT Rapid Hemostasis System is an expandable, multi-sponge dressing that’s used to control severe, life-threatening bleeding from wounds in bodily areas where a traditional tourniquet is of no use, such as the groin or armpit. It works by pumping expandable, tablet-sized sponges into the wound, staunching bleeding while a patient is rushed to hospital. The tablets are standard medical sponges that expand on contact with blood, and the dressing lasts for about four hours. Each applicator absorbs about a pint of blood, and up to three applicators can be used on a patient. To assist with extraction, each tablet contains a radioplaque marker that can be spotted under an X-ray.
If it saves lives and its effectiveness is substantiated by evidence based research....just one more tool in the quiver of life saving technology.
A tool with a very limited range of use. From their website: XSTAT 30 is NOT indicated for use in: the thorax; the pleural cavity; the mediastinum; the abdomen; the retroperitoneal space; the sacral space above the inguinal ligament; or tissues above the clavicle. I'd post a link but don't yet have enough posts to link
Specifically, what are called junctional hemorrhagic injuries - getting shot in the groin for instance, where the artery branches out (the femoral artery branching from the iliac artery....it's deep so it's hard to pack well and there's no place to use a tourniquet. The same sort of anatomy is in the shoulder. You shouldn't use these in the neck (the little sponges expanding will stop blood to the brain, or air....), in the upper chest (ditto the heart or lungs), the abdomen, the pelvis above the inquinal ligament. Below the junction of the groin or shoulder you can use a tourniquet. So these are very specific for one type of injuries ONLY. Injuries that can be fatal, but are not common even in combat. Which I guess is a good thing: We've gotten so good at stopping death from common problems we can devote resources to uncommon ones.