NO FAK First Aid Kit

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

we're going to basically continue and put one more segment into our basic series that we did on the overnight basic camp and the reason I want to do that is because a question that I saw quite frequently actually was a couple number one was you know what do you do about the bugs and number two was when you're carrying a first-aid kit so those kind of go hand in hand so let's talk about the reason that I have no what I call sak self aid kit or first-aid kit now every system is a development process and everything is a living document the Pathfinder school and the Pathfinder system are the same way we constantly evolve to make things better and to better affect our survivability with less items and what I have found is that all of the items carried within the 10 C's including your EDC or the things that you carry on your body every day should effectively take care of all of your self aid and first aid needs barring traumatic injury so what we're going to do is we're going to walk through the kit that we have we're going to talk about the things that we need to worry about are the things that we need to be able to take care of first aid wise and then we're going to look at our kit and explain what we have in our kit that we could use for that because that's the importance of understanding kit mentality is what can you do with the items that you have and how multi-functional are they so that they prevent you from carrying excess items that you really don't need stay with me folks

okay so let's first talk about what we're going to have to deal with in an emergency scenario other than pain control or something that we already understand we have like an allergic reaction that causes anaphylactic shock an insulin issue or something like that that we should already be carrying medication for to begin with and we can carry painkillers like aspirin ibuprofen things like that and that's not necessarily carrying a first-aid kit it's carrying a few pills with you they take up very little room what we're trying to avoid now is a box of spongebob band-aids and a bunch of dressings and things like that that we really

don't need your kit so here's what I think we need to be looking at and again this is an involvement of the Pathfinder system to understand how we can better utilize the 10 piece kit we have bandaging and blood loss broken bones sprains and strains bruises and abrasions blisters and burns bites and stings these are the things that we need to understand how we can address them with the kit we have so these are the things that we're going to talk about one topic at a time using the kit that we have that we've used our overnight camping trip let's look at this as if our pack is packed and we've got an emergency situation that we need to take care of and let's look at these situations one at a time managing and blood loss ok in my back pocket almost every day I have a bandana it's not rag what are you going to call it inside percent cotton

it's a bandage further in my kit I always have duct tape duct tape can make butterflies duct tape chemica bandage duct tape can help control bleeding as far as the tourniquet goes if necessary I have this veil that we talked about this made out of a 10 percent cotton net I can use that for bandage I can wad this up on top make a pressure dressing put this on it and tie it down I can use this also for a tourniquet I need to and again I've got that stuff to control bleeding I've got the duct tape so as far as controlling bleeding goes I'm in pretty good shape without having to break out a wool blanket and cut pieces off of it or cut pieces off my clothing and things like that all of those things make bandaging and will also take care of blood loss as long as I understand what I need to do to stop the bleeding I start with direct pressure and if direct pressure doesn't stop the bleeding then I go to elevation if elevation doesn't stop the bleeding then I'm going to go to suppression or something that's going to constrict an area above that wound in a pressure point or something like that it's going to restrict the blood flow and slow it down I'm not going to go to a full-on tourniquet right

the bat I'm going to put something on Titan above the wound to try to stop the blow the blood flow down and hope that it clots up if it doesn't work then I might have to go into a tourniquet situation but all of these items will take care of that with no problem ok so I'm moving on to broken bones sprains and strains now obviously if you get a compound fracture that's not something you're going to take care of very easily yourself so you've got bigger problems then first aid at that point or self aid but for a possible broken bone a bad sprain a strain you're not sure what the case may be isolation of that is the key we have our rubber mat that we can use we also have duct tape we have these implements that can be tied around things we have cordage in our kit and all of those things will enable us to isolate an injury we can also use something the size of this very easily for Acrobat or a head wrap or a head dressing depending on what the issue is but something that's 3 foot by 3 foot that's big enough to be used for a sling is very important to have within your kit because it's going to be a lot more comfortable for you that just tie a string around your wrist and loop it over your head okay moving on to bruises and abrasions and we'll talk a little bit about abrasions and we'll go back into bandaging and blood loss a little bit because we're going to talk about irrigation we're going to talk about cleaning up that wound obviously we have the ability with a water bottle to cleanse a wound all we really need to do is turn this upside down and the higher we bring it away from the wound the more gravity is going to force that water into the wound to flush it out we're going to do the same thing as far as cleaning up an abrasion bruises are a little bit different story bruises if you have swelling you know if you've got some ibuprofen and things like that that will help if you understand some of the plants in nature that will help other than that you can do things like trying to isolate that swelling a little bit cool it down you know get to a cool Creek and things like that to ease the swelling a little bit they say now that raising the level of the heart doesn't do a whole lot for swelling but at the same time there are things that you can do

and it really isn't going to be a whole lot more than anybody else would do even with a full medical kit as far as a bruised area the swollen because you don't know by looking outside that skin what the problem is if it gets excess then you want to isolate it just like you did with a broken bone and you go back to your broken bone sprains and strains and what you're going to do take care of that is you okay so let's talk about okay so let's talk about blisters and burns for a minute and we have to first think about where the blister came from the dew blister come from a barn or is the blister actually an abrasion type burn or a friction type burn you've got on your foot from walking in wrong pair of boots or an unbroken pair of boots whatever the case may be if that's the case the best thing you can do is pop that blister and then wrap it up somehow to kind of isolate it from any for the friction if it blisters up on you you can make a moleskin type pad out of duct tape very easily just layer the duct tape up cut it out put it over the blister or over a hot spot before it turns into a blister if your blister comes from a burn and you've got a third-degree burn that's a different ballgame altogether you're going to want to keep that thing moist and wet and you're going to want to keep it covered and clean again we have bandaging material we have irrigation type material as long as we have cool liquids and we have bandaging material that we can keep soaking wet we're going to be able to dress that burn very easily burns that are only first-degree burns like sunburns and things like that again that's just a localized pain problem for the most part and you're going have to rely on aspirin that you brought into your kit or some type of plant medicine for that because if you're just talking about a sunburn type burn a first-degree burn when you touched a hot pot you've got a first-degree border you got a sunburn sometimes you just gotta suck that kind of stuff up you shouldn't be carrying a gallon of aloe in your kit in case you get a sunburn don't get a sunburn to begin with where it does when you're in your fire take preventive measures to avoid accidents to begin with but you have the things that you need here to take care of burns if you absolutely have to so let's talk real quick about bites and stings now bites these things can be anything from bug bites they're just driving you crazy at night when you're trying to sleep we've talked about the smudge pot in another video in this series

you can also put things on you like hundred-percent deep we are testing a product right now called bug dope that's made by a buddy of mine if you want something that's more natural it's 100 percent natural you can use plants like yarrow and things like that that we talked about in past videos if you have a bite that is swelling up on you and you're not sure what it is then you need to do something about it whether it be wrapping it with a bandage finding some type of medicinal plant that has drawing properties something astringent that will squeeze whatever is in there out you just need to keep an eye on that bite and if it starts to swell up or puss up then you may need to Lancet you may need to poke it with a needle whatever the case may be just squeeze that infection out and then again cover it with a clean dressing and get it seen to when you get back now as far as things go you want to remove a stinger as soon as possible if you get stung by yellow jock and a bee a hornet something like that you're going to once you remove that remove that stinger as quick as possible so it's not continuing to pump venom into the wound and you can do that by your sail needle if nothing else that you have your 10 piece kit generally speaking I carry this huntsmen Swiss Army knife and it has a pair of tweezers on it that work really good for removing things like ticks splinters stingers and the like so if you've got something like that your kit you're all set but if you don't have that you can still remove that stuff fairly easily with just a needle if you have to that needle is also going to give you a lot of other things as well and we're going to go over the other items in this kit that can be used for first-aid and some of their uses beyond what we just talked about or to go along with what we just talked about okay so when I'm looking at my base kit in the 10 C's if I start at the beginning I look at my cutting tool what can my cutting tool do for me for first aid well it's obviously my scalpel so again it needs to be as sharp as possible if I've got a secondary knife like an sak I'm going to preserve that blade at all cost that razor sharpness to become a scalpel if I absolutely have to have it to lance something with and I very seldom will ever use that I've got two blades on that thing and I very seldom using either one if I have to use one I use the bigger one and save the smaller one razor sharp as a scalpel

it also has tweezers on so that's in my pocket I have a bandana that's almost always in my pocket so I've got that first aid readily available right there I've got cordage around my neck if I have to have something extra to provide stopping a blood loss and things like that I have the clothes on my back inside my kit beyond my knife I go to my combustion device and I look at what does that fire going to do for me well number one that fire is going to allow me to heat water up for rapid rewarming from the inside if I get a cold weather type injury it's also going to make medicine for me if I understand plants and trees it's going to disinfect anything that I'm going to use on my body or to poke or prod my body with like a sail needle or like a knife blade it will help to disinfect that and then the other thing that I have with that fire is I have the ashes and the charcoal from that fire charcoal is very good to make a slurry to drink if you've eaten something that you think is poisoning your system if you think you've gotten food poisoning or plant poisoning of some kind then you can't drink a slurry of that charcoal and you'll be part of it up most likely but part of it will stay in there and start to absorb those toxins and that's important to understand that the ashes that you have in your fire can be used for everything from deodorant to keeping you from sweating to an improvised type of rubbing your hair and those ashes are very much a bug eater as well because they smell like smoke you can use those ashes in your hair and things like that to help keep bugs off of you at night so the fire is very good then I go down the list to the next thing and the number three thing on my list is going to be my cover elements well my cover elements besides my wool blanket are going to be my tarp which I can use that if I need to wrap up in but I have better things than that in my kit I've obviously got this rubber that I can use my rubber mat that like to use for isolation of wrapping of any type of sprain strain or broken bone so I have an isolation device I also have in the front of my garbage can I always carry a 55-gallon drum liner that I can also use to wrap things up with my octave and I carry this emergency space blanket that I can use reusable that I can use for rapid rewarming as well for cold-weather injury or something like that that goes a little bit beyond what we talked about because that's really your first line of defense really takes care of that I don't really look at that as first-aid per se because you should be taking care of your body core temperature or CTC core temperature control is the basis of everything that you need to make sure you understand so that you don't get those types of injuries and then of course you've got the hydration factor of your water bottle so in our container we've got the ability to make water potable so that we can't hydrate we've got the ability to make and cook medicines that we need - anything from washes - something we use for a poultice - a tea - an infusion - a decoction all those things can be made in a water bottle and we're a nesting cup or both very easily so that gives you a good piece of kit that you can use in your first-aid the last item is your cordage and obviously you can use cords for wrapping and binding of any type I would say that duct tape is better than normal cordage but if you absolutely had to do something to sew up the wound which would be my last resort I could use my sail needle and I could break down my bank line into thinner fibers into three fibers and use the thinnest fiber if I absolutely had to sit up a wound which would lie again would be my last resort I've got my sail needle inside my sharpening ten and it's just basically the sharp needle that we showed in a lots and lots of videos that's going to allow me to be able to pick things out of wounds that pick out a splinter to pick out some type of stinger or anything like that and then I've got my cotton material that we've already talked about many many times so far in my kit which is part of the ten seas and we can use for bandaging as well as other things and then the last thing that we have is we have a compass in our kit and our compass if it has a mirror on it it becomes part of our first-aid element or a self ailment because then we can see the cut that we get on our face we can see the tickets in our backside we can see the things that we can't normally see with our eyes if we have that mirror it helps us to see them and the psychological effect that can be great especially if you get a cut on the face of the head because those cuts tend to bleed profusely so if I'm bleeding into my hands for my face you know psychologically I may think I'm dying

but if I can look in a mirror and see that cut and it's just a hairline scratch on my cheekbone or something like that then it's like all of a sudden oh it's not that big a deal whereas a minute ago before I can see it I thought I was going to bleed to death so the psychological importance of having that mirror is very great that's why I say always have that mirror on your compass and then the last C is your cargo tape or your duct tape not necessarily in that order but that will do a lot of your bandaging a lot of your binding a lot of your isolation work for you so there's really nothing that you need other than medication that you should have to carry extra other than the items already in your tempies kit and that's what I want you to understand so when people say how come you're not carrying a first-aid kit I am carrying a first-aid kit but it's the kit that I'm already carrying it's nothing extra and that's the pool okay folks one Dave Canberra at the Pathmark school I appreciate you joining me for this really quick finisher to the series on you know no sulfate kit no first aid kit and understand that the reason we're not carrying extra items is because we can already handle these miscellaneous emergency items in the field with what we're already carrying and again I'm not telling you not to carry medications there's a difference to me between a first-aid kit and medication medication is something that you need that you can't readily produce from the kit items that you already have and you can't easily produce them from the wild without a vast knowledge of plants and trees and how to do those things so if you're carrying an aspirin or ibuprofen or an EpiPen because you need it or insulins and things like that that's a given that's not what I would consider a first aid kit or a self aid kit that's a little few pills there's a big difference between that and a full-blown first aid kit full of bandages and gauze and band-aids and this and that the other thing that you don't need I thank you for joining for this video I thank you for anything you do for me for my school for my family for all my Pathfinder affiliates and friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can thanks guys

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