RATs Tourniquet by Green Beret Medic "Doc T"

all right hey folks this is a real important video because it's one piece of kit I want you two guys to carry because it's really easy very very helpful I'm gonna introduce my guest this is Doc T hey what's going on Travis doc team incredible resource you don't know most likely you don't know him but you should so this is a good intro he was just retired 20 years special for actually haven't retired yet I'm putting in the paperwork soon but yeah I'm still getting old I know dude I gotta get out of there ready to hang that hat up that's right I'm one of the younger guys younger guys bro I am non-operational I'm on YouTube I'm not operational anymore anyway 20 years Green Beret medic so he's invented a lot of stuff that I really like and have used namely the blue force gear the mic micro trauma pouch which we just did up I've showed it to you guys before I'll provide a link for you guys somewhere in one of these corners if you haven't checked out that video now let me go on a little bit of a ramp a lot of you guys are into guns and that's a good thing and you're getting lots of training and trust me you're gonna hear from Travis like the whole video but this is the rant that kind of frames the video a lot of you guys are interested in running and gunning and some of you guys have even been so ambitious that you took a class and that's great some of you have been very zealous and taken many classes and nothing on the medical side listen some of the most you know elite Le feds SWAT tastic door kickers in the world wear body armor and similarly tier 1 tier 2 guys in the military are also wearing body armor there's a reason because if you're going to play with guns and you think there's any chance that you even as a civilian may get in a gunfight no matter how awesome you are how good you are you can do everything right and still get shot having something as simple as a tourniquet with you is a really really big deal don't be the dude that's always training guns and isn't training medical with somebody like this guy and and carrying medical gear in the same way Travis said something there was a little irritating to me and it was good it was like I'm you'd be more likely if you were gonna forget something you if you're carrying a gun you said I more likely forget to carry a gun than I love so yes for me Green Beret medic for 20 years so I've actually run into situations at the gates and stuff like that and I'm more likely to grab a med bag than I am to get grabbed a gun which is you know hey in my civilian life no that is you know before overseas you know you're always got it but now that I'm trying to transition and become like a civilian i I just don't carry as much as I used to when I was on when I was active duty sure and that's my bat and that's my bus and you're gonna help me no no no no I'm not I don't want to judge it because at the same time kind of like that's obnoxious and that's backwards but it's kind of not because you're more likely to need something medical than I think the average Joe fire yeah I agree so there's a ton of situations out there that people so much bad stuff happens in this world today and if everybody would just kind of gravitate towards just a little bit of medicine then we could do so much good you know it sucks it's bad it's horrible but man we could do good out of it too so you know I like medicines love to me I didn't want to be a medic I wanted to be a Bravo I wanted to be a bra gun guy you know and they forced me to do it and now I love it and so now I'm trying to push that word out that obligatory obnoxious today whoever they are those goes alright now it's time to really start the video and get in there's few tourniquets out there that our tea trip will see the kind of gold standards Oh once the cat and if you are a gun guy you know in any type of tactical team or even just a civilian that knows anything about combat medicine or looked out of that you know what these are cats wonderful to put on KITT I've got a ton of these guys a little bit obnoxious though to carry as everyday carry an ID again of just I'm a normal dude in my head walking around I've already got a gun and a knife and my little stabby pen and you know things of this is a little bit bulky to me and so for everyday carry I wanted an easier solution doc is there an easier solution for everyday carry there there's you know yeah there is actually really oh yes that's the process so the rats tourniquet was born in Afghanistan right we as a green beret medic dude we work with the locals heavily you know we're we're big on language we're big on culture we're big on you know we're big on the the ideals that we need to work by with and through these guys and so with that came the need to treat canines that need to treat children the need to treat the elderly the need to treat all these different situations that don't get me wrong I love a cat tourniquet I carry them in my vehicles I carry them in my med bags but when I was trying to treat these this constituency of these people it just didn't fit so you're saying this will you know you can we got a dog walking she's right here on my feet you can use this on a dog and this one not as much the same with the kid yes dogs little kids dogs the cat tourniquet is really good at what it does it's good at the you and me sighs okay but when you start talking about some of these third-world countries that we're still heavily involved in it doesn't work on the kids it doesn't work on the elderly they you know I treated a couple kids that they're suck their arms were the size of silver dollars you know trying to get something that has this much bulk and and if you look the the width of just this piece of the part of the mechanism that makes it work is it's hard you know and it's in it and it's heart-wrenching when someone comes to you with a kid that's injured or or hurt and you can't do anything about it except for hold that kid's arm until you can get to a better situation so this and what is this called this is the rats tourniquet this is the this is actually the 2.0 so this one is fresh off the press we we went back to what people were saying and they were asking they were like hey we'd like it to be a little bit longer so we added six inches we stopped using the metal crimpers to hold them together and now they're sewn this is a hundred percent very compliant now okay before we were getting a couple parts from overseas and with anything in the military if you want to sell to the military it's got to be very compliant so we really kind of we're excited there's gonna be a new tourniquet downselect coming out soon from rumor mill and we're submitting to be in that down slice so hopefully soon you'll see a teacher will see approved route stern and d-triple-c is kind of like they haven't approved tourniquet since like 2004 they're not just like is it mm yeah 2004 there hasn't really been a down select you know slice 2004 on tourniquet so it's not that you know this this isn't t triple well guess what nothing is because they haven't even like they haven't looked at a thing right so so the real thing is that's not the big standard that I should be looking for necessarily that does mean something it's does it actually work absolutely and see I've got dad on this but I have no idea whether this is actually work I don't think it has and hold on if you guys are interested in something like this I'm going to put links below for you so chill out you can get it at the end of the video if you're interested there they're inexpensive work well and do some stuff that this doesn't you can carry it easily every day carrying stuff anyway doc tell us would this work and realize so absolutely um I worked with the crew dudes about you know between three to five thousand dudes at a time so with that many Afghans I've seen a ton of trauma you know when you think about some of the places we were you know eastern Afghanistan northern Afghanistan so you know Kabul Afghanistan I've had a lot of dudes that worked for me that were under me I started fielding these out to those guys before I even filled it out to the general public in the United States just because I would buy the crap out of him and be like hey try this try this try this and I used them kind of as beta testing but you know in a good way and that's where that's where it evolved to what it is today with this tourniquet it's so simple to use it's so fast and it works on more than just the average Ranger the average adult you know it works across the board which is amazing because man I have a five-year-old you know and if I wanted to send my I do I send my five-year-old to school with the blue force gear micro trauma kit you know the basic version without the needles without the and he goes to school with that in his backpack and for me putting a rat's tourniquet in there just means everything because I know he's five he's not going to be able to pull it out and use it but at the same time he knows to pull it out if something happens and show it to an adult yeah and so then they're able to go oh my gosh look at this I can use this now some of the cool saves on these things as kids you know there's been a few times or where I messed up and I learned some really really hard lessons one that really sticks out in my mind you know one night I got a call to the gate and I was on you know my name was on the board you know my name was on the board if something happened for those guys to come wake up and so the dudes come wake me up they're like Doc Travis let's go to the gate there's something going on they didn't say what and in my freshly awoken state I grabbed my gun and I ran down to the gate thinking it might be a security issue of some kind well one of the local dudes brought a little girl up to me and she had almost severed her whole right arm from a tractor you know and so and I felt so crappy because as I'm standing there looking at this little girl it just dawned on me and I went you know and I just my heart sank because I didn't grab any medical kit yeah I grabbed my rifle that's all I grabbed yeah so very Bravo of you yeah very Bravo ish you know being the smart guy that I am I put direct pressure you know I tore close tore my clothes up and used it as an improvised bandage wasn't the tourniquet effect that I really wanted we're a steer there's no hospitals it was just me so I had to take this girl up to my tiny little clinic up on my base treat her as best I could stabilize her give her fluids get her heart rate go and get her get her back stable so that I could then patch her up and send her on her way to the hour and a half long drive to get to the hospital you know and so not having this tourniquet with me really hurt me you know you know and it really sunk sink home for me that this little girl could have died because of one of my mistakes so patched her up put a tourniquet on her put the rats tourniquet on her you use this yes I used that because she's so small she was so small and left it tight but not so tight you know one of the things about this tourniquet is it's it's not elastic it's it's a it's a hardened material it's not gonna give you know the cool thing about the rat's tourniquet is it is elastic so I didn't have to like I didn't have to like crush it down to the point where she was going to just be in agonizing I could put it just tight enough like with circumferential wrapping and you know and get it to the point where it would stop the bleeding enough that I could put a really nice dressing on it and send her on her way and I'll you know let that lesson was a lesson that I learned and it stung yeah you know you you're Green Beret medic here you know you want to be like the best of the best you're you know you're do surgeries you do all this stuff but yet a simple thing like that could have affected the battlefield I didn't leave like think about who that girl's dad was I don't even know but you know maybe it was Taliban maybe he was a warlord maybe you know but saving his little girl's life changed that guy's mind me I don't know maybe on who we are overseas you got any other saves with these tons tons probably a couple dozen so it's working in real life oh yeah legit probably yeah it really does work oh yeah definitely very good Afghans I've got dozens of saves with it the Afghans have hundreds of saves with it Wow Afghans you know like my Afghan medics are man sizes silver dollars feel like a superhero yeah you know the dudes are pretty stout you know the guys are there their normal size but I like I said I was putting these out to the field to the guys and and you're talking about 3,000 dudes that are fighting the Taliban fighting in and they were getting in ticks all the time they were getting so yeah so many saves with it very good I wanted to talk just a moment about some brass tacks stuff of let's see first of all the price points about half the cost of one of these so it's like 15 bucks or 16 bucks comes in a bunch of different colors if you don't want orange I use I have black and mine I've got a video on how to wrap it like this so it goes through a belt loop it doesn't enter doesn't affect my draw stroke or anything but and if I wanted I just pull this off right here and literally it's just ready to go so it adds no bulk for me it doesn't affect my draw stroke and yeah truth be told of I was carrying these and I like it because it's so just low profile you can put it in there and it doesn't affect anything it's like you're not carrying at all I took a step back because you know somebody that I respected just kind of asked me some questions on of like what that's not T Triple C there's not you know unnecessarily data on that it may or may not be a good solution and you know he wasn't ragging on it was just kind of a big question mark and then I have this sacred trust with you guys and this is why I took a step back and it's really because if I say something or hold something out you guys le military civilians a lot of you guys may go buy it off my recommendation if it's not up to snuff good product then I'm steering you wrong and then I'm jacked up so used to be in my own mentality if I just carry whatever I thought was best but now it's like a sacred trust with you guys so I stopped recommending it it's not that I wasn't right not recommending it was just that I'm waiting for more data now I have the data and I'm saying yep I am carrying these I'll usually always have them with me at least off body carry in my vehicle or on my person trust doubt Dottie's testament to it and I appreciate your ingenuity and making it if you want to jump in and answered any of that that's great and then also show you how to put it all this is a gin one and if you look at gin ones they were crimped together and what we did was we came together and we said hey man how can we make this better so the Gen 2 is actually sewn together so now we're sewing it together it's everything's very compliant now some of the stuff we had before some of the parts and stuff were rare from overseas but now we're getting and we're sourcing everything in the States actually here in Salt Lake City Utah Utah one of the one of the things people asked us was hey you know what about the length well with me I use a we used our friend one of the guys Jeff from ready man and savage gentleman he's a stout dude he's you know he's thick he stood out and we used his thigh in order to measure to what we wanted for Lake and this is a bodybuilder guy if you got a ready man you'll see he's huge yeah he's like me I've seen him he's like a little tree trunk you know and so we used his thigh as our measurement so if it'll fit Jeff it'll fit you um and I'm not like Jeff I'm skinny dish guy so yeah a lot of lot of cool stuff going on with it the color schemes we just wanted to be able to offer my thought is if I EMS guys are orange so I do EMS guys for orange we have blue ones for law enforcement red ones I like to push the firefighters black and tan for operational dudes you know and so that's kind of where the colors come from is for me if I'm a doctor at a hospital and I can look at a tourniquet and it's easy I don't have to write on it or anything and say oh shoot this came from an EMS guy you know and I kind of know who placed it and I know maybe in a mass casualty situation where it came from yep so that's why that's kind of the modality behind that good let's move so as always with tourniquets you always want to go as high as you possibly can and I don't know if anybody ever explained that to you but there's two bones that run down the back of your forearm and there's a single bone up here so we want to get occlusion so we want to push that bone up again or that nerve artery vein up against the bone and that's where a solution comes from Kirby super easy it's pretty one-handed you can do it yourself I actually do it to myself if you want first sure so that they can see how one-handed it really is so I like to just kind of throw it up high and you're basically girth hitch you already got a circle you go through the circle it's already got a circle you just go through the circle and as you can see as I'm pulling it it's it's getting inclusion and that's that's plenty hurtful enough right there that's it that's it that's all it takes your bags are already starting to deploy already starting to pop up get on and get my pani two of them when I go yeah when I put on short-sleeved shirts who was the rest looked like that had the ties from the 80s was that sting Randy Savage Oh Randy Savage Randy Savage and out here guys I'm gonna take this off cuz it's really starting her yeah but what what a really cool thing is with a piece of tourniquets have been around forever you know tourniquets have been around for hundreds of years they use them in World War two they used them in the Civil War and circumferentially wrapping is basically how they use tourniquets yeah well we just took those principles and we applied it to this tourniquet we we want a circumferential e-wrap to build the width that the cat tourniquet would normally have I could actually build more width than a cat tourniquet by circumferentially wrapping so that's a big that's a big thing it's like oh this is so thin I don't want to use it as you rap you're gonna build width and that's all that matters the other thing is when you get injured your body reacts to that injury and it sends everything to it hey I've got an injury I've got to go check it out do you get you swell so if you put a tourniquet on that's the that's the reasoning behind hey I gotta check this tourniquet every five minutes you know you know before I was a medic I used to think what I have to check this tourniquet every five minutes it's not gonna fall off you know it's not because it's gonna fall off its peak or it's gonna move it's basically because as your body starts to compensate or go into compensated shock it don't withdraw some of that stuff that it bit it sends all the little firefighters out to fight the fire you know and as it starts going okay I'm good it starts pulling them back to the station and it says hey bring the guys back we've got to protect the core basically and with the bungee tourniquet it'll it'll adjust to that so as you as you swell it's gonna it's going to adjust and as you decrease swelling the bungee tourniquet it's gonna actually work a little better that way not that cool how can these folks first off if like you've got this stuff guys get the rats it's too simple too inexpensive and too helpful to not get get it it's a smart idea also the BFG like micro trauma kits that's that's good that's a much bigger investment but it's an awesome one what else how can they find you do training yeah absolutely so my social media is at to cement number two below in the description at to see Matt hit me up for training blue force gear and I have a goal a lofty goal to train a million people in the next five years and so we really were excited for what you guys are doing at the warrior poets and we really kind of want to you know not just on medicine but on you know situational awareness and everyday carry and you know it's tough I did write an article in the November issue of shooting Illustrated if you want to learn more about medical kits and in general check that out it's on nra comm go but if you want to get these rats medical blue force gear calm below in the description and grab them and i i'ma let me just carry out it with this I'm a fan of all tourniquets there's not a tourniquet I don't like there's some that I favor more than other but I'm a fan of anything that's gonna save my friends or my family's life or even people that are you know the Good Samaritan Law very warrior-poet ESCA yeah that's good so I can stamp you with my brand I'm a friend I'm just a fan of helping people at school growth and so I carry anything and everything I carry cats tourniquets I carry soft tea I carry the rat just swatting swap tea even you know it's a very Lopez option not my favorite but I'll still use it if I have to but please if you're not gonna buy the rats buy something go do something help someone you know be there go its we need it in our country right now with all the stuff that's happening you know so just be aware Rock home in doc T thanks so much guys thanks for tuning in and see you next time you

Channel: Warrior Poet Society

Views: 179,578

Rating: 4.8809199 out of 5

Keywords: RATs Tourniquet, CAT Tourniquet, SOF-T Tourniquet, Tourniquets, EDC tourniquet, EMT, EMS, EDC medical, Blue Force Gear, micro trauma kit, emergency trauma, second chance medical, travis hall, Doc T, John Lovell, Special Forces, Medic, Green Beret, 18D medic, designed by special forces, Warrior Poets, IFAK, Combat Veteran, War Veteran, Special Operations

Id: FzIXjG0I9EU

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Ace2021]

I’m subbed to John as well but haven’t seen this one yet so thank you. For minimalistic carrying purposes it is definitely better than the CAT but I’m still not really convinced of its effectiveness on a femoral injury (the one that will kill you faster than any other aside from carotid, which you obviously can’t TQ). It’s something about the thickness of the band that is off-putting, so I would have to personally evaluate it tbh. I do like the generation 2 RATS though.

When I think about EDCing a TQ it would be for the purposes of treating myself not a dog or pediatric patient, so I would stick to the CAT. I’m not sureI totally bought that dudes story about treating the little girl because an 18D (SF Medic) should how to make an improvised tourniquet with a kravat, but the RATS definitely is faster to apply.

Verdict from me is EDC it as a stop-gap before you can grab the CAT in your vehicle or backpack.

[u/DeaditeParasite]

I almost always agree with John on his opinions and recommendations but I'll still stick with the CAT and SOFT T and SWAT Tourniquet. Because those are proven to be effective. Until actual data comes up my RATS will stay in some other medical kit in my closet not in my primary or secondary medical kit.

[u/dbmeed]

After I wrote up the list of recommended gear, they were numerous users that expressed concerns about the RATS being on the list, as it is lacking TCCC approval, and has not been thoroughly tested. After watching this video, I am curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.

/u/Ace2021 /u/MSeager /u/Blacknights