How to Treat a Sprained Ankle

Series Summary

There is an adventurer in everyone, a desire to explore nature. But what happens when Mother Nature gets angry? When the time comes to find food and water, most individuals are completely ignorant. Some become disoriented. Many are not strong enough to keep safe until they find help or get rescued. This is why wilderness survival skills should be learned by anyone who enjoys spending time in nature. Who knows what may happen if a simple hiking excursion went wrong? In this free video series, a wildlife and hiking specialist provides helpful advice and tips for surviving in the great outdoors. Discover how to treat a sprained ankle, how to treat fire ant stings and how to splint a broken arm. Find out about assessing burn injuries, making an outdoor first-aid kit and building a lean-to. Survive in the wilderness with these helpful tips.

Video Transcript

"Let's talk for a minute about sprained ankles. First of all, if you're walking along in the wilderness, and you happen to sprain your ankle, and you happen to be wearing boots. Ideally, what you want to do is just leave your boot on, don't take it off. If you've sprained your ankle and you have a boot on, and you take the boot off, that will promote swelling, but if you keep the boot on, it will act sort of as a compression instrument, to keep your ankle compressed, and prevent swelling, which is actually a very good thing. Now, if you're wearing low top shoes, this isn't really an issue, because they're not going to be covering your ankle, so let's take a look at how you want to splint an ankle, if you happen to sprain it. If you happen to sprain your ankle, and you need to splint it, once again, you can use the very useful SAM Splint. What you are going to want to do, is to open the SAM Splint up, and put it on the bottom of your foot, right on your heel, on the ankle that's injured. What you are going to do at that point, is wrap the SAM Splint on either side, around the back of your ankle, like this, forming a sturdy cast around your foot, up around your ankle, and at this point, you can tape around the splint, to help keep it in place. If you don't have any tape, you could use a shoe lace, you could use your other sock, part of your shirt, whatever you happen to have, but you just want to keep it in place. Once it's splinted, ideally, you won't want to walk on it. You could find a walking stick, cut down a small sapling, and use that to help bear some of the weight, as you walk along. If you don't have that option, you can walk on it. Try to keep most of your weight on the opposite foot, because any weight you add to that ankle, is just going to cause more damage, and more pain, and it's quite uncomfortable."