 Hey guys, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and chances are you have a rat's tourniquet. So sit down, go grab your rat's tourniquet because we're going to take a look at it and I'm going to tell you why you should throw it in the garbage. Okay so I got a rat's tourniquet a couple years ago because at that time it was the only tourniquet I knew of that could fit on a child. You can also use them on pets. That was one of the big selling points for the rat's tourniquet was that you could put it on on a kid or someone with smaller limbs or whatever and it was much more versatile than the standard like cat or soft tea wide tourniquet. Saw several people on the good old YouTube that I respect and that recommended the rat's tourniquet and so I bought two of them. I made my wife carry one around in her purse for a long time in case she ever needed one for our kids. Then I went and took some medical training and I found out why the rat's tourniquet is not that great. The first thing about the rat's tourniquet is that you need to remember what you need is about two inches width of band in order to get good compression. Now as you'll notice this thing looks like about a half of an inch of width in the band and I'll show you why that's a problem. For those of you who don't know how to put on a rat's tourniquet you're about to find out. This part goes through this loop. Okay so if I ask you to put on your rat's tourniquet right if I would say hey I just want you to go grab your rat's tourniquet right now put it on. I'm going to pull up my black shirt here so hopefully you can see this a little bit better. Okay so I want you to pause this video right now and put your rat's tourniquet on and then we're going to compare notes. Did that? Okay great here we go. So if I ask you to put on a rat's tourniquet this is what you're going to do right? You're going to crank that sucker hard come over here come over here then you're going to work it through that cleat right in order to stop it. Now here's the problem with the rat's tourniquet. You see all these little differences in you see all these gaps here where I wrapped the tourniquet right? What's going to happen is you're going to get compartment syndrome on each one of these bands and all the tissue between there is going to die and when the tissue dies everything below it has to get amputated which means that if you wrap your rat's tourniquet like this I'm going to lose everything below this tourniquet. I'm going to have to get it amputated because all the tissue between here is going to compartmentalize you're going to get compartment syndrome and that tissue is going to die. So I'll have bands of live tissue with intermittent with or interspersed with bands of dead tissue and like I said then it all has to go. That is the problem with the rat's tourniquet is that because it gives you compartment syndrome you're automatically going to lose that limb with a standard tourniquet right? Like a softy wide or a cat tourniquet you're not going to lose the limb. The tissue directly underneath the tourniquet can still be alive. Now look I'm not a doctor I'm not a medical professional none of that stuff however I'm just telling you what I've learned is is that if you use this thing it is going to kill the tissue you're going to get compartment syndrome and you're going to have a problem. Now one thing you could do to try to mitigate that problem is to wrap the tourniquet as tight together as possible right? So I could try to wrap it something like that. I can't go around to the cleat right now but if I stretch it better you could right? So the tourniquet is lined up better to not have those compartments. You could attempt to do that. Here's where we meet the second problem with the rat's tourniquet. That is have you ever tried to put this thing on your leg? So let's say we had to put the rat's tourniquet on our leg. Now I'm going to try here I'm going to do it kind of mid-thigh so that you can see what's what's going on here all right? Again I'm going to take it I'm going to crank it as much as I can all right? So that's one I can get it around a second time. So I get about two to three whoops two to three wraps right there is what I'm getting. And if I put it of course further up on your leg where it's supposed to go oh yeah I am not I can't get it around a third time. So that's it that would be about it right there. So that's really about one bandwidth. I'm getting about one bandwidth if I put it around or excuse me two you're getting two bandwidths if you're putting around where you're supposed to put it on your leg. So that's the other problem is it's not going to stop bleeding or it's not going to be able to I should say reliably and effectively stop bleeding if you have it on a large limb like a leg. There are lots of times where people have to use two cat tourniquets or two softy wide tourniquets on legs and this just isn't going to cut it. It doesn't have enough length and then again we go back to that compartment center issue where this isn't wide enough. So what you should do is take your rat's tourniquet and you should throw it in the garbage. That's where it should go. You should get a softy wide tourniquet by tactical medical solutions or you should get a cat tourniquet by North American Rescue and those are the only two tourniquets you should really have. Honorable mention to the SWAT tourniquet. I think one of the things they could do with the rat's tourniquet to make it better is if they took this band and made it more like the softy wide tourniquet. If they widen this sucker out to two two and a half inches and that was your width on this and then you added another I don't know two feet of length on this. So you could add it to you could wrap it around your leg better. I think then we might have a viable product here but unfortunately as it stands I think the rat's tourniquet is more of a problem than a help because you're going to end up with that compartment syndrome and if you need to use it on a leg or maybe someone who's just really beefy and they got a really big arm you're going to run into problems and you're not going to be able to control bleeding. Throw your rat's tourniquet away and thank me later. Do brave deeds and endure.