I Know About Giving First Aid

First Aid Kits

Moving Injured Individuals

Abdominal Pain

Blisters

Burns

Choking

Cuts and Scrapes

Dehydration

Eye Injuries

Fractured Bones

Frostbite

Heart Attack

Heat Exhaustion and Heat Stroke

Hyperventilation

Hypothermia

Insects

Internal Bleeding

Internal Poisoning

Mammal Bites

Nosebleeds

Poison Plants

Puncture Wounds

Seizures

Serious Bleeding

Shock

Snakes

Sprains

Stopped Breathing

Stroke

Sunburns

Teeth

What this Book Is and Is Not

First off, this book is NOT a comprehensive set of knowledge that gives you an automatic medical license. It is not intended to be a go-to guide in an emergency, and it is definitely not the final say in how to treat illness, disease and damage. Treating it as such would be wrong.

However, millions of people go through an event requiring first aid on a daily basis. So many people are in need of help, and you can never really know if it will be you or not. This book is intended to impart some of the current knowledge available to keep you prepared for a time when you may need to be the one giving potentially life-saving assistance to someone in need.

DO NOT use this book as a means to develop or prescribe a treatment. You may use it as a reference for what to do in an emergency, as it is based on professional knowledge.

What is First Aid?

The term first aid means exactly what it would seem to mean - the first assistance, or aid, given to a person who has become sick or injured. It is the initial series of things that can be done in order to help a person until professional medical assistance can be given. I recall back to my days of scouting I thought first aid made me a healer, like I could go out and save the world with my skills, but that's not what the skills you learn in first aid are for.

The purpose of gaining knowledge of first aid is so that you can know what to do to help a person in the in-between time from the moment they are injured to the moment the professionals are able to help. It is not meant to be a long term fix, but a short, intermediate help to a suffering individual.

Still, it does have the ability to save lives. Take, for example the story of Becky Fry, compliments of British Red Cross:

"When Becky Fry’s 93-year-old grandmother suddenly started to choke and turn blue, her horrified family was stuck to the spot – but first aider Becky knew exactly what to do.

The emergency occurred during a quiet family lunch in Somerset with relatives. Becky (26) recalled: "My granny started to cough and excused herself from the table. My cousin went with her to make sure she was okay but the rest of us stayed at the table because we didn’t want to crowd her.

Suddenly my cousin shouted for help, saying granny couldn’t breathe, so I rushed in. Not only had her lips gone blue but her face had turned purple and her eyes were bloodshot. She was making alarming rasping noises and clutching at her throat. It was very scary!

Despite the pressure, Becky stayed calm. She said: I told my cousin to ring an ambulance and slapped my granny hard on the back several times. My cousin was actually on the phone to the emergency services when an enormous piece of half-chewed sausage shot out of my granny’s mouth.

Catastrophe averted, Becky’s grandmother