How to Treat an Arm Injury in the Wilderness

Video Transcript

"So hand and arm injuries are something else you've got to worry about. You know your shoulder can get damaged if you fall and catch yourself wrong, your arms can get broken, you can get hand injuries, puncture wounds, but whenever that happens one of the major things you want to do is keep the arm and the hand close to the body so that it can't get further damage, and the best idea is to go ahead and put it in a sling. One of the easiest ways to make a sling is to go ahead and cut a large triangle piece of cloth out of a T-shirt or a rag that you have in your bad. You're going to make sure that the actual point in the triangle is toward the elbow. You want to go ahead around the body and you want to go ahead and tie a knot in it. Then once you've got a knot tied in it you want to go ahead and slip it around and slip the arm into it so that it creates kind of a caddy, and then you want to make sure that it's elevated right at the heart, close to the body, and what this is going to do is it's going to make sure that on the way out to medical attention no further injury is going to happen to that arm, to the hand, or to the shoulder. "