FROM AIMLESS'S POST (THE QUOTE GOT BOGGLED WHEN I TRIED:

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4. A small basic first aid booklet, of recent vintage. If it gives much space to making and using
tourniquets, it's too old.
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Aimless, the recent US Military experience in the Middle East is bringing tourniquets back into use. They've found tourniquets to be useful for treating traumatic injury (blast effects and gun shot wounds) to the extremities (arms and legs). I recall that one of the reasons they were losing people to these sorts of injuries was that they were bleeding out before they could get the victim to a surgeon. If you can get the victim to a surgeon w/in 1 hour, they've also been able to save limbs treated in this manner.

This is an old news articile, but it helps get the point across: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.tourniquets02may02,1,3994385.story

Obviously, the situation being discussed here is a "life or limb" situation with uncontrollable bleeding - the sort of thing you'd use a tourniquet for in pre-war experience as well. The basic line of thought here WAS: direct pressure, elevate, pressure points, and THEN tourniquet.

What has changed is that tourniquets have moved up in the menu of options when someone gets shot or blown up - because they are bleeding out FAST due to cut or torn arteries and veins. To give you an idea of how seriously military medics are starting to think about this, one I knew pressed several tourniquets off on me when he found out that I don't carry one.

NOT the sort of thing you'd usually think about when backpacking, unless you're going during hunting season and even then the incidence would be really low. A blaze orange hat might be the better, more weight and pain conscious, choice.

Steadman