Make Your Point With a Safety Pin

Those of us who have responded to overhead announcements for a doctor on the plane or tended to an ailing friend on the hiking trail know that medical care is rarely limited to the 4 walls of the office. A safety pin is recommended by wilderness medicine texts as one of the most useful tools for your first aid kit.¹ Its many uses include removal of foreign bodies from the skin or cornea; drainage of abscesses, blisters, subungual hematomas, and thrombosed hemorrhoids; skin testing; holding gaping wounds together; splinting a mallet finger; fashioning a sling for shoulder and arm injuries; removal of ticks; puncture of plastic bags for irrigation of wounds; and pinning the tongue to the lower lip of an unconscious victim to establish a patent airway.

-Nathan Hitzeman, MD
    Sacramento, Calif

More Pointers >>

References:

REFERENCE:

1.

Auerbach P.

Wilderness Medicine.

5th ed. Philadelphia: Mosby; 2007.