In movies, after someone is shot they are in great pain or even crippled until someone pulls the bullet out. Once the bullet is plucked out and dramatically dropped into a bowl, the victim seems to be completely fine. Is the bullet being in the wound really the biggest problem? Is it preventing the wound from closing somehow?
In: Biology
> Is the bullet being in the wound really the biggest problem? Is it preventing the wound from closing somehow?
In reality, taking the bullet out would actually be your biggest issue. If bullet is “stuck” in the hole, means it is also blocking your blood from spilling everywhere.
Any movie someone gets stabbed or hit with an arrow, and they take it out, that’s a no-no move in real life.
In most cases, a glass shard, bullet, arrow, knife, being stuck on you, means it is also stopping the haemorrhage.
Movies do it to make the “badass to take out a bullet and patch up”, in reality, that’s how you manage to kill someone by blood loss
Typically you only remove the bullet if it’s shallow/easy to get. But it does help speed up the healing process since there will be less inflammation from a foreign object being in a wound.
However it wouldn’t help with pain or making the injury immediately better.
Yes, if you had an open wound, your body wouldn’t be able to close it until the foreign object is out. Obviously, in a real situation, you would wait until medical personnel authorize the removal of said object, and they would also clean that wound as much as possible to stop/lower the chance of an infection.
One of the biggest issues with a bullet in a wound is that it has dragged a piece of clothing with it deep into the wound and that combined with the bullet will cause infections or stop the wound closing properly.
Most of that is just movie silliness. Sure, the bullet may add to the pain (such as by scraping against bone and nerves), and it may aid the would in closing/healing, but many people literally go through their lives with bullets still inside their bodies. In fact, sometimes, removing the bullet can actually cause additional harm–the bullet may be the only thing preventing the victim from bleeding out, and removing the bullet could lead to death.
The biggest problem that films rarely mention is the risk of infection. Simply removing the bullet and sewing the wound shut, without properly getting out every last bit of debris and killing any bacteria inside, can lead to massive damage or death from a developing infection.
It might have made sense for the story in some old movie, but at this point it’s just a series of lazy writers mimicking what they have seen. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeHaveToGetTheBulletOut
The most important thing initially is to slow and stop the bleeding. So, you don’t go digging into an open wound to dislodge a bullet. More than likely, you’ll only push it deeper and cause more damage. You wrap the wound and/or apply a tourniquet and then seek medical help.
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There’s gunshot tampons. They are pretty cool. They’re meant to temporarily stop the bleeding until the ER does it’s thing. Plenty of great responses especially the top voted one. It’s all make believe in movies. Even the ones that say based on a true story.
I’ve never been shot before but I have suffered quite a few nasty wounds on my limbs and from personal experience a properly cleaned and bandaged wound did let me regain most of my mobility and lessened a lot of the pain.
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