In fact as a disclaimer, it wasn't my research. I wish it were, but it wasn't. This was a product that was developed by the U.S. military called QuikClot. When tactical combat casualty care came about there was the development of tourniquets. If you had a traumatic injury to an extremity, to a leg or an arm, you would put on a tourniquet that would stop the blood loss. However, as you got closer to the body, to the torso, it became harder and harder to apply a tourniquet to that. So what we had was a good solution for amputations to the hand, or to the foot, or to the lower leg, but we didn't have a good solution to proximal amputations because you couldn't get a tourniquet on that. So the U.S. Army Institute for Surgical Research came up with this product called QuikClot. If you apply it to proximal bleeding where you can't put a tourniquet on, it promotes clotting.
This product was put out with the Canadian Forces as well as a method for dealing with bleeding that you couldn't stop with a tourniquet because it was too close to the body. But then problems were identified with it. When you applied it you would put it in water and it would give off heat and it would cause some mild skin burns. As a surgeon who had to clean it out I didn't find it a big problem, and personally I was much happier that a patient came in with an amputation that stopped bleeding than I was worried about a few superficial skin burns. It's always about trying to improve care to the next level. Then the next generation of product that came out was called—I forget the trade name—but it was based on a shellfish product that you would put on and it would stop bleeding as well.
The problem with that is the way it was designed: if you were bleeding a lot the product would wash out. So then a lot of U.S. companies focused a lot of effort on coming up with products that would work that would try to deal with these problems.
Obviously, because it's the U.S. military there was a huge financial incentive for these companies to do the research because if it was adopted by the U.S. Army they would order millions of these things. So there was quite a lot of progression in terms of the development of hemostatic dressings. In my role as national practice leader for trauma, we would often be asked to evaluate the product in terms of reading the studies and seeing whether we should adopt them for Canadian Forces soldiers. I wasn't involved in the actual research, in their development.