Crush injuries can occur in many different situations and can easily do great damage to a victim.
Understanding the ways in which crush injuries can impact the body may go a long way in helping a victim get the immediate and best treatment possible.
What is a crush injury?
These injuries typically occur when a victim ends up pinned, compressed, run over, flattened, squashed or otherwise mashed between two or more hard or large objects.
Examples of crush injuries can include someone getting trapped beneath debris due to an earthquake, someone’s foot getting run over by a vehicle, or someone ending up pinned between a car and a tree.
Crush injuries of the trunk
Medline Plus takes a look at the impact of crush injuries. No matter how the crush injury comes about, it will almost always do relatively severe damage.
Trunk crush injuries involve the torso of the body. One of the biggest potential complications involves failure of the organs, which may end up deprived of oxygen and blood flow depending on where the crush injury occurs.
Crush injuries of the limbs
On the other hand, crush injuries that involve the limbs and extremities usually have a higher risk of tissue necrosis due to the lack of oxygen and blood. This can lead to the possibility of infection which may cause gangrene, necessitating an amputation.
In either case, sepsis may also occur. This deadly blood infection can take a person’s life in less than 72 hours. These complications are why it is important to get a crush injury victim in for proper medical care as soon as possible.