hey guys my name is Sam and welcome to prep medic this week's video we are reviewing and testing two tourniquets from Rhino rescue let's get into it so I've been putting off doing this video for a long time just because it always brings up controversy uh and that's not really what I'm about at the same time this is pretty relevant because a lot of people are going to Rhino rescue products instead of buying North American Rescue cat tourniquets or any of the other uh products on the coot C recommended list there are a lot of
them I will leave them on the screen for you to check out it's not just a monopoly of the cat tourniquet um anymore there's a lot of different brands you can get on there that being said these tourniquet I got two metal windless tourniquets and two plastic windless tourniquets from Rhino rescue I think I ended up paying like $30 uh on them and that was from their website with no discount Associated so I totally get why people really want to see stuff on the Rhino rescue tourniquet because for the price of like four of these
tourniquets I could get like one and a half cat tourniquet uh from the website if it's not uh discounted so I understand the desire now I am going to evaluate them on their merits and like the company and all of that um in this video but I do want to come out and say first and foremost no matter how this performs uh in the testing no matter you know what I say about it I can't recommend these simply because they're not not vetted um they they are not uh committee for tactical combat casual care recommended
There is almost no literature out there on these tourniquets uh whatsoever and I can't tell you to go out and make your patients guinea pigs of an untried and tested medical device so I can't recommend these no matter what I'm not going to recommend these to you I'm not going to recommend you buy them um if a surgeon was like Hey I'm going to use this new tool in the operating on room on it's a little bit cheaper but there's no data to say it works like you probably wouldn't go into the operating room and
be comfortable with him doing that to you maybe you would maybe you're a lot braver than me but I personally uh wouldn't and that's very similar to uh these devices right here that being said let's open these up and uh take a look at them now a lot of people are probably most interested in the metal windless tourniquet uh that they have the packaging is very similar to North American Rescue uh tourniquet This Is the Gen 2 so right here we have the metal windless uh tourniquet looks a lot like a cat and here we
come to one of the moral conundrums of this product if you can see on this packaging this one's the plastic windless one it says combat application tourniquet to me that is Shady that is shady as it gets because they are um counting on you to see cat and not understand that a combat application tourniquet is a North American Rescue product this is not a combat application tourniquet they call it that um but it's not the same thing these a cat tourniquet is not like a type of tourniquet it's a brand it's like Kleenex uh on
there so right here they're already being a little bit Shady with this uh I got this both in coyote brown because it's easier to see um on video the operation of these is identical to a cat you're not going to do anything uh different with it so right here we've got the uh band you tighten that as tight as possible put around the limb and then you tighten the swind lless it does have a little like pen in it these are so freaking dumb um and I don't know why we're so obsessed with like putting
writing utensils in here like okay cool I can write the time oh it doesn't even really work I can't get it to write so all right so it's got a writing utensil even if somebody was like yeah I really like that great I can't write anything um with that and I just like smudged off the end nope still doesn't work so writing utensil doesn't work it's just an extra thing that they threw in to trick you uh into buying this product let's open the plastic one so this is the one that's labeled uh combat application
uh tourniquet right here so as I get into this packaging open this guy up and this again it looks almost identical um the internal band right here is uh coyote brown like everything else and everything else is the exact same it doesn't have a writing utensil um anywhere on it so both of these are very very similar to the cerate these are instructions they're whatever um there so let's talk about what I think about these Now spoiler alert I've already tested two of these tourniquet um the test wasn't super scientific so if you're expecting me
to you know know exactly how much force I applied to both of them and know exactly what occlusion pressures were I won't I just tested them on my uh table but let's talk about this company and these tourniquets and why aside from the committee for tactical combat casualty care not recommending these aside from that why I really can't stand behind uh these products so number one is we have Shady marketing of a medical product the second it's trying to claim it is a cat TNI kit my you know BS antenna are up because no reputable
company is going to just try to be another um you know company like that like they could make their own product that if they believe it works better you know they can make their own product and sell it legitimately and not trick people into buying it so I really don't like that kind of marketing especially when they're marketing a lot towards like everyday carry crowd you know if you're trying to find a economical option and you don't know much about medicine you might go with one of these because it's like hey it's the same thing
um as a cat TNI I can get this for a quarter of the cost or half the cost uh and be good to go so I don't like that marketing right uh off the bat number two it is manufactured in China which we use a lot of stuff that's manufactured in China this very excellent camera that you were watching this video on all three of them are manufactured in China so that's not necessarily a turnoff but one it will automatically preclude these from being recommended by the committee for tactical combat casualty care because they have
to be very compliant for them to be uh recommended on that platform simply because um our military if we go to war with another large country we cannot be supplied for life-saving items from that country so automatically they're precluded there number two is there's no QC to these products um you know I reached out on Instagram to some people that I know um you know that worked with people or work directly in the Ukraine conflict and through them they were talking about getting pallets of these tourniquets and some of them work some of them you
know are going to function appropriately they also said some of them are missing stitching on them I've talked to people about their pressure bandages and when they pull the pressure over on uh the plastic like Fork they break I've got a video of that um they're talking about chest seals coming with no adhesives on them whatsoever and like if you're talking about your pressure bandages braking which is like it's a bandage it should be really really easy to apply um or or to build and make something reliable how are we going to trust something like
a tourniquet which although it doesn't seem super complicated actually has a lot of technology that goes into it so right there we do not have any QC so yeah I don't know what the number is um you know you could get a bunch of these tourniquets and you know eight out of 10 will probably work fine and include blood flow for your patients but are we really comfortable with that 8 out of 10 you know obviously there's always going to be a failure rate for any kind of Technology there's going to be a time where
something gets past QC something doesn't work but it seems abysmally bad uh for Rhino rescue so right there I'm not going to use a product that I don't know it's going to work kind of like if I'm you know on the ambulance or the helicopter and I reach for a video oroscope to intubate a patient if every 10th time I turn that on it wouldn't function I would never reach for that oroscope because it the problems with it going bad outweigh the benefits of using it those nine other times um and it's the same here
now one funny thing I did notice on it is that like this has like a scratch sticker to verify it's a legitimate Rhino rescue um product which I just think is funny because these are you know kind of cat knockoffs uh there so right there I just can't I can't get behind them um that's all pretty shady a lot of firsthand accounts are that these things are crap products now I did test it I look weak as I'll get out on that video because I put it on dumbbells there's no like tissue give on that
and I got some turns around with both uh the metal winess windless and the plastic windless and neither one had like a catastrophic failure in there I tighten them both way more than I would on a normal patient um and it got to the point where even the cat started to fail but I wanted to show you some of these and I'll get the cat turn to get to show you as well and show you kind of what wear and tear is there after like I think I was at like four rotations um this guy
started to fray and come undone at this middle strap now if this middle strap fails this entire tourniquet fails it comes back now you can see the windless bent as well the cat tourniquet the windless bent um too but it wasn't quite as misshapen and this got to the point in this where it's so misshapen I couldn't turn it anymore not necessarily because I didn't have the strength um but that was also part of it but also because it wasn't protruding from the end I had nothing nothing to grab onto it was sucking it into
the bracket the other thing that was happening is when I was turning it around this bracket right here was collapsing this was coming down it was making it so I couldn't seat it into the bracket to get it to hold now this is in a very controlled environment where I am rested healthy I've eaten food I'm not in combat right now um so if it's failing in a studio space I can only imagine what the battlefield failures are going to be and this windless it didn't snap but man that is deformed right there so we
have a lot of potential failures on this guy this one the windless the plastic windless actually held up better and this this is a point I want to make to a lot of people people will say like ah metal I want metal winless because it's better like with composite Plastics and all the technology we have out there A lot of times these Plastics can be better than the metal um I didn't have a failure with the band this one did not deform quite as much similar to the cat tourniquet there I didn't have any plastic
uh ripping or tearing down here um I did have the same issue after one turn with the bracket where the bracket collapsed because of how it was tightened and I couldn't get it to seat uh in here even now it's a little bit tight and you can see right here as I'm looking at this granted I Ed this once and these are one time used devices so I can give it a little bit of pass I've got total delamination right here of this velcro and it's hardly held on by any uh adhesive right there so
right there I've got a failure this is a crap product I would not buy this I would not um trust anybody's life to this product now for a demonstration purposes I can show you the cat tourni kit I used all right right here so the failure I had with this after I think I was on like four or five turns is it had so much pressure on this bracket it was actually bending the bracket out and it was really easy for this to click off of it um so the bracket will stop working uh at
a certain point that's the failure I had with the cateret but as you can see there's really hardly any def uh deformation of the windless after being tightened two more times than this guy and a couple more times than this guy um it's really not as deformed there's no uh fraying on the strap whatsoever uh and it's really in pretty good shape I will use this as a training tourniquet moving forward so one thing I want to head off here before you know I stop this video is that somebody's going to comment they're going to
be like well I bought 20 and I tested them at home and they worked just fine for me um they're good enough it's the good enough crowd which is fine I understand that desire to do your own testing all of that good stuff but what I don't think those people realize is how much data went in to the recommendation of a cat tourniquet of you know the any of the other options on the market uh for tourits that do have a lot of science behind them there is so much data that goes into them second
what my biggest complaint with a lot of these Chinese manufactured tourniquets is the lack of QC the lack of any kind of quality control going out of that factory because that makes the device unreliable and we don't have good numbers to say how unreliable it might you know fail every other time it might fail eight out of 10 times if you bought three and you tested three and they work that doesn't mean um that it's a good product we have to look at hundreds if not thousands of these products to determine if they work now
uh the people I've talked to in Ukraine have pretty universally told me that they don't work that these are crap devices that they have tons of problems that they actually sent shipments back do you know how bad something has to be for an active war zone to send medical supplies back to the manufacturer pretty freaking bad so I would not buy these I would not trust them listen guys if you're we're we're talking about life saving we're not talking about LARPing we're not talking about you know that you know fun sight on your you know
the the holl and sight on your gun that you take out to the range every once in a while totally fine your life's not depending on it this is medical gear um this is somebody's life if you put a tourniquet on somebody and that's your plan a and that thing snaps off their arm when you twist it you are so behind the eightball you have to start wound packing you have to recalibrate your brain um to go to a plan B it's just not worth it carrye the real deal I get it they're expensive but
if we're talking about someone's life it is totally worth it and I'm willing to bet that most people that argue for cheaper options like this aren't the person that's you know super not well off they probably have a lot of nice stuff at home um and they're just trying to skimp in one place it it's just it shouldn't be here guys um so with all of that being said I I will see you next week [Music]
