Medical Monday: Field Sanitation, Heat injuries

As I’ve talked about before, field sanitation is a huge deal for partisan forces. Field environments are always dirty and if care is not taken sickness can work its way through your force diminishing your combat effectiveness. Merrills Marauders were no stranger to sickness and even had a platoon that cut out the seats of their pants because they didn’t want the rampant diarrhea they had to inhibit their ability to fight.

With the temperatures rising and more people spending time outside it makes sense to talk about heat injuries and how to prevent them. Heat injuries is a term that covers a few different issues. Generally, it covers heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and sunburn. As with all things medical, prevention is the best medicine. Acclimatizing to your environment is a huge thing. We have the fortune of not being shipped off to faraway lands for the fights we prepare for, so this part is fairly easy for us. GO OUTSIDE. Spending time in non-climate-controlled environments is the easiest way to get used to that environment. Also, drink water. When you are working outside, you should be drinking about 3 gallons of water a day (for hot and dry climates). You need to drink water to replace the water that is being sweated out. You also need to replace the salt too. Don’t go buying a bunch of gatorade, buy salt. We process salt in our food much better than we process salt that we drink. You can drink Gatorade (water it down first) but it doesn’t count towards your daily water needs. a good thing to keep on hand for emergencies is a product like drip-drop (I prefer the watermelon flavor, it tastes like watermelon jolly ranchers). Keep in mind, don’t add these to your canteens. Either keep a smaller water bottle for additives like this or use your canteen cup. You do have a canteen cup, don’t you? If you add it to your main canteen you can cause all sorts of nasties to start growing in them. How you wear your field clothing can help you from becoming a heat casualty. If you don’t have to blouse your pants, don’t. Keep the clothing around your ankles, wrists, and neck loose. Also, these cooling towels work quite well. Another trick I learned when I was on Bragg was to take a drinking cooler and fill it with ice and water. When someone is needing to cool down quickly, have them stick their arms into their elbows and hold them for at least 10 seconds. That should cool them down pretty quickly. Once you become a heat casualty, your chance of it happening again increases. Do the work now and acclimatize to your environment.

Have you dealt with heat casualties before? What do you do to handle them?

I’ve got classes on the schedule and I have kits in stock along with another new kit on the way.