It’s another Saturday afternoon with nothing to do but enjoy the beautiful California weather and contemplate the meaning of life. The day is young, the warmth just right, and I’m just counting down the minutes until I’ll be scootering back down into Berkeley for my friend Sumaiya’s 21st birthday! However, it’s still early in the afternoon and the boredom is settling in.

I just got off a video call with my friend who’s working towards a firefighter position in Southern California and he brought up an interesting topic in emergency medicine: the rise of hemostatic agents. Like a well trained salesman, he quickly gave me a run- down of the advantages of these new fancy bandages that I’ll highlight for you all as well.
Kaolin has been used for testing for lupus anticoagulants, and is very sensitive to heparin, a blood thinner. [3] It is an aluminum silicate that has an unknown mechanism of action, but acts through a contact-activation pathway for clotting (contrasting the extrinsic tissue factor pathway that we know, that cleaves prothrombin into thrombin in a clotting cascade). [4] Addition of kaolin has been shown to activate clotting, which is why it has been used in QuikClot.

Originally, use of the tourniquet derived from military practices, before eventually trickling into civilian use. Like the shift in paradigm that brought tourniquets into normal use, hemostatic agents have been adopted by EMS agencies due to its efficacy at stopping clotting on the battlefield. [6] Retroactive studies have been analyzed to determine whether the hemostatic agents were not only indicated, but proved more effective What the results showed proved hemostatic agents to be conclusively more effective gauze.
Problematically, the prohibitive cost of QuikClot may be part of the reason why it has not been implemented into widespread use. However, given the effectiveness of hemostatic agents like it, there should be no reason that widespread adoption of hemostatic agents in the near future will not take off. In the future, I hope that mysteries like the mechanism of action for coagulation due to kaolin may be researched so we can save the lives of our soldiers in war.
Your friendly resident vampire,
Joseph Maa
p.s. If anybody knows html well enough that they can fix the line spacing after images, I would love to know how to keep the text consistent. Cheers!