Treating Leg Injuries in the Wilderness

Video Transcript

"Ok so what we're going to talk about now is immobilizing a leg for a leg injury. If someone breaks their leg in the middle of the woods one of the first things you want to do is go ahead and make sure that you've immobilized it, made it to where it can't move in any direction. If you're dealing with a puncture wound you should obviously treat the bleeding but immobilizing a leg and making sure that it can't move while they're being transported is a major portion in how successful repairing the leg is going to be. One of the easiest ways to do is take a shirt, you can tear a couple strips off of it, you want to find a couple sticks or you can find newspaper or any type of book. Now what you want to do is you want to go and lay the sticks directly down the side of the leg and what these are going to do is they're going to immobilize the victim and make sure that the leg can't move. So carefully you want to go under the leg without moving it much, you want to go ahead, put the actual stabilizers in the middle of the leg. Tie them off fairly tightly, a lot of times the first one is the hardest but once you get them there it's usually fairly easy. So once you get these guys lined up straight you're going to put a couple more under the leg, usually three or four of these is about all it takes. You want to get these other couple fairly tight even if the victim doesn't really appreciate it because this is what's going to keep it from further injuring the leg as you move them out of the woods into a doctor's care. So again first of all immobilizing a leg injury is the first thing and second of all then figuring out how you're going to move them from this position into the doctor's hands. Those are the major two things you've got to be worried about with a leg injury."