Medical and health

What you can genuinely do at home, and where the ceiling honestly is.

• Clean and dress a woundFive to ten minutes of running water is the whole treatment. Antiseptic goes on the skin around the wound and never in it, because it damages the tissue trying to heal.
• Treat a burnTwenty minutes of cool running water, and it still helps up to three hours later. Nothing else you can put on a burn does as much, and several traditional remedies actively make it worse.
• Choking, by ageFive back blows, then five thrusts, alternating. The thrusts differ by age and getting that wrong causes serious harm: abdominal for anyone over one, chest for a baby under one, never abdominal on a baby or a pregnant woman.
• CPREverything about CPR except the one thing text cannot give you, which is the feel of the right depth and rhythm. Read this, then book a course, and if neither is possible, do it anyway: badly done CPR beats none.
• Mix oral rehydration saltsSix level teaspoons of sugar and half a level teaspoon of salt in a litre of clean water. Probably the highest lives-saved-per-word ratio of anything in this app, and it costs nothing.
• Recognise sepsisThe highest-consequence recognition task in this whole app. Sepsis kills fast, it hides behind ordinary illness, and the single most useful thing you can do is say the word out loud to whoever is assessing the patient.
• Splint a suspected fractureImmobilise the joint above and below, in the position you found it, and check circulation before and after. The one exception to never straightening a limb is when there is no blood supply below the break.
• Remove a tick, and watch for LymeFine-tipped tweezers, grasp close to the skin, pull straight up without twisting. Then watch the bite for 30 days, because the rash that matters appears between 3 and 30 days later.
• Anaphylaxis and the auto-injectorAdrenaline into the outer thigh, and then keep them lying flat. Standing someone up during anaphylaxis can kill them, and it is the mistake a helpful bystander is most likely to make.
• Closing a wound, and when not toMost wounds should not be closed, and the ones that should can usually be done with strips or glue rather than stitches. If nobody is coming, delayed closure at 48 hours is the safe procedure and it is a real technique, not a compromise.
• Assisting a birthMost births need no help at all, and your job is warmth, hygiene and watching for bleeding. This page covers the normal course, the signs that something is not normal, and what to do when nobody is coming.