Welcome to part 2 of simplified orthopaedic
In this part we talk about splints
Imagine this: you are taking a hike in a remote forest road.you are lost in your thought and not paying enough attention to a small hole in front of you.suddenly you you lose your balance and as you fall down you try to cushion your impact with your wrists and as you do it you feel a small crack in your wrist and an immense pain
Congratulation!you just broke your wrist!!
As we said before the most important part of taking a care a fracture is to immobilize it.that’s when splint and cast are coming to play.each part of our limbs have a different function and when they are fractured, each of them need a special splint or cast.
Splints are used to cover part of limb and immobilize it in process.when you are using a splint it’s important to know to immobilize ONE JOINT BEFORE AND ONE JOINT AFTER the fracture site.it’s the golden rule of splint and casting.the reason is when you try to use a joint, the bones before and after that joint will most likely move and rotate.
Now let’s talk about your fractured wrist!wrist consist of 8 bones and when one of them injured, as our golden rule indicates, you must stabilize one joint before and one joint after them.so your splint should include your elbow and base of your fingers.we call this a Sugar-Tong splint.you can easily do this in our little remote forest!just use to small branches,put one in front of your forearm to base of your fingers and one in back and use a makeshift rope or bandage to keep them in place.this will prevent your wrist from moving and decrease paint and prevent that deadly compartment syndrome we talked about in part 1
Now let’s imagine a similar scenario but this time you are having and ankle sprain.sprain doesn’t mean bone fracture but this mean your tendons and ligaments are damaged and your soft tissue is swollen.you have to immobilize your ankle to decrease the pain and swelling.so let’s remember our golden rule again; according to that you have immobilize your knee to your base of fingers again.to do that we’ll make our splint like a long boot.it covers from your fingers to about 3 inches under your knee.
Fractures on other parts of our limb are follow the same rule.fingers?just splint your fingers from base to tip.patella?splint from wrist to uder hip.your humerus?splint from shoulder to elbow.your arm?splint from upper elbow to fingers
Keep in mind we don’t have splints for femur fractures.technically we do but we have to cover from stomach to knee.but there is a cast for it and it called Spica cast.
that's it for part 2.in part 3 we talk about casts
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