Self Defense Medicine Session 1: Introduction

Howdy folks, Caleb Causey with Lone Star Medics. As a proud contributor of Personal Defense Network, I'm honored today to be talking to you about self defense medicine. Now before we get into the self defense medicine curriculum, I'd like to give you a little bit about my background. I've been a medic for about 15 years. I started my career in high school riding out with the Explorer program with the Boy Scouts of America out of Fort Worth, Texas.

Then after high school, I joined the army and spent four years as a combat medic stationed in Germany, where I was deployed a few times to the Balkan regions, places like Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo with field units and airborne infantry units. After the army, I joined up with the local fire department and was a member of the fire department for about six years as a volunteer firefighter EMT. During that time, I worked on the ambulance, on the engine company, and also with the dive team. Along with working with the fire department, I was attached to the police department as their SWAT medic for six years. During those six years, I worked as a private security contractor for a bit, and then I attended paramedic school at TEEX, down in College Station.

During which time, they recruited me to come back as an adjunct instructor, where I was able to attend state and national level instructor certifications and courses. When I came back home, a few friends at the shooting range said hey, well why don't you teach us a few things in first aid out there in the shooting range, and I did, and here we are six years later and we have several different courses and Lone Star Medic is what it is today. When dealing with a violent altercation, medicine changes a bit. So that's where self defense medicine comes into play. Some of the subject we're gonna discuss over the next few hours are gonna be things like assessing the scene and making sure that the scene is safe for us to be there and if it's not and there's still a threat, we need to go ahead and deal with that before we can start rendering aid.

We're gonna go into detail later about that, but then also, we're gonna talk about, hey, how do I assess myself and others, whether it be loved ones or bystanders? Along with once we identify some of those injuries, those immediate life threatening injuries, how do we treat those, and more importantly, when do we treat them? So we're gonna be talking about things like tourniquet application, application of a pressure dressing, hemostatic agents, chest seals for penetrating thoracic injuries, and last but not least, we're gonna talk about how to identify and treat for shock while out there in the field. So let's get started.