Life-Saving Tourniquet Invented

Once fatal injuries are now survivable with the use of a new inflatable abdominal tourniquet, the creation of former US Army surgeon John Croushorn.

This new tourniquet stops heavy bleeding with a clever, yet incredibly simple, mechanical design: A medic buckles the device around a patient's abdomen, over the belly button, and then tightens it by twisting a windlass. A hand pump inflates a wedge-shaped bladder, which displaces the bowel and compresses the patient’s aorta against his spine, halting all blood flow to the lower body.

According to a recent Army report, a device like this tourniquet could have prevented an average of three military deaths every month between October 2001 and April 2010.

Kudos to Croushorn and co-inventors Richard Schwartz, the chairman of the emergency-medicine department at Georgia Regents University and a former combat medic, and Ted Westmoreland, a former medic with U.S. Army Special Operations. Well done.