Bushcraft Basics Ep15: Personal Med Kit

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Video Transcription

hi there guys Smike from MC q bushcraft here and welcome to episode 15 of bushcraft basics we've sort of got to a point now in bushcraft basics where you've got a fairly usable kit that you can take out in the field with you there are obviously a lot of things we haven't covered yet but because we're starting to use tools like knives and we're going to start looking at swords and axes I'm actually using them in the field to process materials you're going to want to think about carrying on you a very basic first aid kit just something for the time being that you can treat yourself on a personal level it doesn't have to be anything incredibly elaborate and doesn't need to be filled with items that you're not really sure how to use just something quite basic and that can be used on a personal level to treat minor injuries so in this episode here I'm just going to show you my personal first-aid kit that I carry with me day-to-day the one that's in my backpack and it pretty much stays there all the time obviously unless I use it then it comes out but bear in mind there are other environmental influences as well that can in it it really affects the human body like what can affect your core temperature like hypothermia and I po thermia so think about the environment you're in this isn't a all in one episode this is just a basic episode for people who are starting bushcraft starting to use knives and swords and tools out in the field and they really need to carry a basic first aid kit on them to treat those injuries they might have so at a glance you can see that it's a very basic kit very small and it's really just got a bit of hygiene equipment in there as well in fact this is my hygiene and a medical kit and underneath that what it's sitting on is actually a part of my hygiene the medical kit as well this is a scarf or ashemark and they're very useful they're quite absorbent they're good if you have a quite a serious injury they can be made into a triangular bandage so you can support a broken or sprained arm in most respects it can be wrapped around wounds and it can also be used as a towel to dry yourself to wash your face with and that's primarily what I use it for is it for a lot of different things but preferably not as a emergency piece of equipment because hopefully I wouldn't have that issue but for hygiene it's used quite frequently I'm just using it to actually sit all this stuff on top of at the moment but it packs down into the pouch like that you can see this compression bandage is a 1 pint bandage and it sits at the top and this can be taken out it can be put in my pocket I can carry it around with me and it's there to grab straightaway with very little hassle it doesn't have to be taken out of the ziplock bag and you know while you're bleeding and Bloods going everywhere you just pull the tab rip this out and it's ready to use so I always carry one of those and I've only ever had to use one once with an injury with an axe that um you know things just went wrong and I had to get this site and it really did help quite a bit it's um

I've never really am not carried one since that day to be quite honest with you so I'll put that to one side but we've got the ziplock bag here and you can see it says Medical hygiene and there's a date the 9th to the 5th 2015 and that was the last time I used this med kit for an injury something probably pretty minor I can remember correctly but it was the last time I used it and it was the last time then it was serviced afterwards I topped everything up inside that I used with spare gear at home and I always write that on the Ziploc bags that I've got because if it gets too long the date you start to forget when you actually opened it up last and what condition it's in but that tells me that this was the last time I used it and the last time I serviced it and it shouldn't have been touched since then and everything should be have been replenished inside it also good things have a ziploc bag like this as if you're canoeing or it's raining pretty heavily in a bit of water seeps into that pouch it doesn't get into the med kit and it doesn't soak all these tissues and other things around it but let's get this open and we'll have a look inside so at the top I've got some tissues I have two packs of tissues that I carry and I use these for a variety of different things I have a pack at the top because sometimes when you get a little cut putting a bit of tissue on it is a great way of just stopping the bleeding very quickly and just containing it until you can get something a bit more formidable out of the med kit to actually help control it

and tissues are pretty underrated really in some respects I find tissue is ideal if you get a cut and you just want to put it on there and absorb a bit of blood and just slow it all down it's also pretty good as toilet roll as well which is one of the main reasons why I carry these little packs here he's a fantastic as toilet paper and also pretty good for hygiene as well if you need anything like that but before I turn to things like moss and other natural materials around I like to use this first

I've got in here something that isn't really part of the medkit but this is a toothbrush and I usually use this just with fresh water there are certain plants that are around that you can use this with but more often than not I just brush my teeth with fresh water you can use charcoal off of the fire as well not ash but charcoal and that's quite soft and it won't damage your teeth but to be honest with you I've always done pretty well with fresh water or even being out for weeks and weeks because you can chew on various plants and things and help freshen your breath up a bit if you need to but this is in there it's in a little case just like that which protects the bristles stops a lot of dirt getting on it so another part of the hygiene kit I've also got a Phoenix LD 22 I've had this torch for such a long time for decades and I've never changed it there's a fantastic torch I've done other videos on it takes doublea's has adjustable brightness just there it can last for days and days I rarely use it if I'm honest to be honest most of the time when I've used this I've been fixing the car underneath it and I can't see that's probably why it's covered in wax oil but it's such a useful torch I get on with it so well and I do have a head strap for it in the pack so it can actually fit on your head on a head strap and it's some really great torch use it a bit for lamping for rabbit shooting as well so it's got so many uses that thing and I only carry one torch I do carry spare batteries though but just the one but that's pretty much everything that's available at hand inside the ziplock bag if we get rid of the ziplock bag we've got a med kit but the ziplock bag actually has quite a few uses as well and for example when I burn myself which can happen sometimes on the fire

I generally fill the ziplock bag full of cold water and put my hand in it because sometimes you don't have the luxury of running water and a ziplock bag like this can hold water for you you can put your hands in you wouldn't probably want to put it in your container that you cook and eat ice off if you've got dirty hands but it can go in there and it can obviously keep your hand quite cool you do have to change the water that because your hand will slowly heat up the water around it but it is quite good for sort of five or ten minutes if you just burnt yourself and you just want to get some cold water on there and that's generally what I do with burns I don't treat burns with any kind of gels or special plasters or solutions I just find all of that makes it worse just find cold water is the best way for burns but that's just my personal opinion there and what I've been taught so the ziplock bag can be fairly useful as well so if we open up this med kit here you can see it's pretty small and pretty basic it's just a very personal med kit that I use it can fit in my cargo pouch you can fit in a jacket pocket and that's why I have it quite small like this because sometimes I leave my pack behind and I go out and do things like shooting or I go fishing or something like that my pack might be left at a campsite so carrying a little med kit like this on you is a great thing to be able to do is now it's going to be no good back at camp if I make hiking somewhere and I trip over and the thorn goes right into my knee or something I'm going to need my med kit with me at the time so that's why I have it on such a small scale and the way it can be broken down is quite useful too but I'll take you through while I carry and you can get an idea of the sort of things that I use first I've got a slightly smaller bandage than the larger one that I carry on me and there might be an injury serious enough for me to Warren using a bandage like that I carry some tape as well some microporous tape and duct tape or gorilla tape can be used as well something like that is probably got more uses than this here but because I don't really use anything like that day to day I mean duct tape and they're in a tight I do have it in my vehicle but in a med kit are generally just carry microporous

tape I just find it a bit more useful I've got a mirror the mirror is pretty essential in my opinion this is a life venture mirror it's not a signaling mirror there you could use it for signaling the only disadvantage with this mirror here is it bends a lot it's really fragile so it's not the best mirror in my experience I've owned two of these and both of them Bente quite badly say at some point I will change this mirror so I don't really rate this one and I don't recommend it to be honest to people out there but it is okay it just gets scratched up and it bends and you can't see yourself properly but what this is for is if you get an injury to the eye or to the face and you can actually then see the injury by looking in the mirror I've got some scissors here some really small little scissors I don't have any of the heavy-duty ones that can chop ten peas in half or anything like that just some basic little scissors just to do some chopping with a knife isn't always the most useful tool to cut small pieces of fabric with so a little pair of scissors is quite useful I've got tweezers as well I've just fallen out these tweezers here are pretty good for and things like ticks and thorns and they're sharp enough at the tip from me sharpening them so I can dig with them so I can dig in and actually get the fall now the scissors can be used for that as well as well as cutting your toenails and fingernails say all together they're they're quite useful as a little team I've got some needles and thread and this is mainly for repairing equipment this is bank line and Bank line can be separated into lots of different thread strands as well and these needles god forbid this is not for me stitching myself up with I would never really want to do that and it wouldn't I'd hope I'd never get to a stage in life where I'd have to do that but it's mainly just a repair kit and I just keep it in the med kit because it kind of just ties in with everything else in here I've got some large sterile adhesive dressing these are sort of large pads that can go on wounds even things like blisters these are very good for and I did a lot of hiking in Norway I've got some blisters here and there and you know you're able to manage the blisters quite easily and cut these to shape and wrap them around your toes and put them in areas where normal dressing and plasters would probably just kind of fall off these here are really important this is non-adherent dressing and this stuff is absolutely brilliant it's like a wet and if he ever get a wound where say he took the top of your knuckle off and it was like an exposed face of kind of flesh really that was bleeding what would happen is if you put some dressing on that some normal dressing it would sort of interrupt the healing process when you took that dressing off it would tear away a lot of the healed skin and the coagulation or clotting and the scab of the actual wound and it would cause it to bleed again and you need to be back to square one and you'd be forever re managing that and it would heal very slowly but what this does is you actually put it over the wounds and you can cut it to shape and it doesn't interfere with the healing process so if you have a wound like that you can put this on top and then your dressing and then when you come to change your dressing it keeps it nice and moist it heals very quickly and I find that they're absolutely fantastic actually managing wings in the field and changing dressing so I always carry these on me I've got loads of them in the actual truck as well in a much bigger med kit a much more heavy duty med kit in the actual vehicle that I've got with me let's just turn this around and have a look at a few other things you've got some antiseptic cream stuffs pretty good quite useful if you think you're getting a low-level infection you can put antiseptic cream on and actually use that it's pretty useful stuff antiseptic wipes are pretty good if you get a lot of grit and dirt in an actual cut if you don't mind the pain you can scrub all that tight and clean it all up of it and then dress it so the antiseptic wipes are useful I don't use too many of those to be honest with you I've got an assortment of plasters here lots of different types of plasters I mean I use plasters pretty frequently if I'm honest

then then mostly what I would use out in the field for cuts and scrapes some cuts don't even need plasters you can just leave them as they are and just make sure you keep them clean that sometimes having plasters is pretty useful if you want to keep the dirt I got other kinds of plasters here as well these are breathable plasters and these are actually very very useful on blisters hey I find these very useful on breasts blisters these breathable plasters so I do you keep those on me you can see I've got a lot of everything but it doesn't weigh a lot it doesn't weigh a lot and it just means I don't have to keep topping up the medkit and if I go away somewhere I can take bit site it's not really a big deal and you know I can always put a few things in my pocket I've got some other standard dressing here this is again just plaster like material a bit like this adhesive dressing but just on a smaller scale and I just quite like these four larger cuts and scrapes alongside suture strips and in case I'm stuck somewhere and I really need clean water and I get something like dysentery

I've got chlorine dioxide which is my favourite way of treating water on the chemical side of things I used to carry soya mini but I really just keep that in my vehicle now I much prefer carrying these just because it doesn't really get used at all but if it does need to be used I can just put some dirty water filter it through a rag in my canteen here get the chlorine dioxide in there and it would be quite useful for me to have water available to me if you know I really need to get fluids in me quickly one item that I don't have in my med kit but I always carry one round my neck is a whistle and this is a bone whistle that a gentleman made for me in the United States and he sent me it along with a lot of other natural items but I wear this while I'm out in the field all the time and it's a very effective whistle even though it's made from natural materials and having one of these on a piece of cord that has an inherent weakness in it so if I pull this it will actually snap around my neck and that way it won't support my body weight and actually asphyxiate meals strangle me in any way so it's very important these 550 paracord I'd advise you put another piece of cord in between that can break because that will actually strangle you if you get caught or you fall but this will just snap straight away as I've tested it quite a few times but a whistle is really important one I'd recommend the people out there is the jet screen whistle this thing is incredibly loud it's not expensive and it's really effective so you can see that my med kit is very basic it's quite portable and small it can be broken down very easily and it's really just there to treat minor cuts and scrapes things like cuts to the fingers with knives and saws and axes things like grazes and thorns and blisters and bites from various types of insects or stings and blisters on the feet and burns so it's really just there to treat all of those things but also help me with hygiene as well using this shemagh things like mirrors and a toothbrush and tissue and the natural resources that you can find around you you can maintain your hygiene obviously I haven't touched on things like hypothermia or hypothermia and managing your body's core temperature but that's something that I do with my clothing systems that I have my sleep systems and I manage my temperature through that way with hats and the correct footwear the correct socks things like sealskin socks or wool socks woolen under layers I wear clothing really that can dry very quickly or repel water very well because I'm in a damp environment but at the harder times of the year the temperatures here are very mild anyway and it's not really a huge concern but I think if you are new to bushcraft and you're going to start to go out and do some camping at this point in the video then just take with you a mylar blankets as well in your med kit it doesn't weigh a lot but it can actually be a bit of a lifesaver

so this video is really just to show you what I carry why I carry it and just to kind of inspire you a bit and show you what you might want to look out for if you live in the similar environment to me and you do similar things but if you live in a completely different environment in a different part of the world I don't I'd advise you seek expert advice from people in that part of the world have a look at other videos for example and people in that part of the world even do a first-aid course because that way you're arming yourself with some really good knowledge and you'll be able to put together a kit of things you actually know how to use and you could administer first aid to yourself or others and you actually help people out so I hope this videos helped you out I hope you found it useful and I'll see you next week in another so dove bushcraft basics thanks for watching and please see the links in the description below take care guys I'll see you again