When I was in the Marine Corps during my school of infantry training, one of my instructors
told me that every action movie was about to be ruined for the rest of my life and he
was correct.
It's just not possible for me to watch something involving military tactics or strategy or
something along those lines without just picking it apart mentally with all the inaccuracies.
I mean, why on earth are they still saying, "I repeat", in the radio?
It makes no sense but that's a different story for another day.
The same though can be said for medical knowledge.
Not only are the characters in these TV shows and movies surviving events they shouldn't
survive, they're not getting overly injured or if they are, it's just a flesh wound and
I still don't understand what this flesh wound business is.
So, my hope is that you and I can bond in sharing this pain now because in today's video,
we're going to use the cadavers to look at three types of injuries that I tend to notice
the most in these movies and TV shows that just seriously bug me.
So, hopefully they can start bugging you in the exact same way.
It's going to be a slightly frustrating one.
Let's do this!
[Intro]
First up, we have primary blast injuries.
Now, we've all seen it, right?
That epic scene where our hero is walking away with that massive explosion behind them.
They're not looking because they're too cool for that or maybe they're running, they jump,
and they narrowly escape this wall of flame coming at them.
Either way, it's still going to be the same problem and the problem is the laws of physics
because when an explosion happens, not only do you have shrapnel coming at you and fire
coming at you, you also have a blast wave coming at you.
And depending on how close you are to the explosion and the size of that explosive device,
that's going to have an impact on what it does to your body specifically.
Now, if it affects your eye, we call that "blast eye".
Blood vessels can rupture.
Your eyes can start to swell and you can even go blind.
If it affects your lungs and respiratory tract, we call that "blast lung".
You can have bleeding inside your respiratory tracts, you're aspirating, you could get a
collapse lung, you're just going to have overall difficulty in breathing but there's two that
I mainly want to focus on and the first one is what we call "blast brain".
Now, you're looking at a left hemisphere of a human cerebrum.
So, there's going to be different lobes like the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital
lobe in the back.
But what I want you to understand is just how delicate the brain tissue is, right?
Neurological tissue is extraordinarily delicate and I'm sure this is something you intuitively
understand but picture this blast wave coming through, going through the skull and starting
to propagate into the neurological tissue - it can cause brain bleeds to happen.
If you look closely, you can see all these darken lines, those are blood vessels those
can rupture.
You can also get rupturing of the actual neurological tissue itself.
You could get the brain slamming into the skull and these are all forms what we call
traumatic brain injuries and we've seen this in service members through in war for many
many years, right?
Explosions cause traumatic brain injuries yet In these action movies, they just seem
to survive explosion after explosion and they just go home like it's no big deal and it
drives me nuts because they should have some pretty serious psychological and neurological
damage simply from the blast wave hitting and traveling through their brain.
The second primary blast injury is what's called "blast belly" and that's going to affect
the internal organs here in the abdomen but real quick because I forgot to mention earlier,
I'm curious to know what other medical injuries you find Hollywood movies or TV shows are
ignoring because these three are by no means the only one.
So, be sure to leave us a comment below and maybe we might address that in a future video
but with blast belly, if you look here at these internal organs, you can picture that
blast wave is going to affect them just like it did with the brain.
So, this massive organ here is the liver.
This can actually fracture, it can rupture and break.
Here on the side, let's see if I can pull this out.
This is the spleen.
The spleen is a reservoir for blood.
So, if this ruptures, you will be bleeding at a massive quantities inside of your abdomen.
The stomach which is behind the liver here, this little pink thing, hopefully you can
see that, that can rupture.
The small intestine can rupture.
The colon or large intestine can rupture and in fact, this is the most likely organ to
rupture from a primary blast injury.
All of this can happen just because you were too close to the explosion when you're trying
to be all epic and run away.
I don't know what's going on.
In all these movies, all of this somehow heals.
As far as I'm concerned, it must be magic.
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Alright, let's get back to it.
Next up, we have bone and joint injuries and Geoffrey has been nice enough to offer a helping
hand in this situation but these ones really bother me because they're almost always ignored
in movies and TV shows.
Go ahead and think about punches.
One of the most universal things you see in action movies - not even just action movies
and TV shows, you see this all over the place.
People punch someone and then they just move on and it's absolutely insane.
Like, let's just picture a haymaker is delivered right to the side of the face.
You can get multiple fractures in the maxilla bone, the zygomatic bone, the mandible, right?
The nasal bones can break and that can cause massive amounts of swelling.
It can cause eye injuries.
You can cause bleeding, tremendous bleeding, profuse bleeding from the nose and then, that's
not even to talk about the injuries to the hand itself, right?
There's a reason why professional fighters typically use padded gloves and that's because
even though there are techniques and forms and things to really you know, limit the damage
you can do to yourself, it's still physics - you're still just smashing two hard things
together so - and that just doesn't make for a good movie.
If you see Rambo deliver this haymaker perfectly and then break his hand and then he can't
fire the machine gun, it ruins the movie.
So, I understand why we have to suspend our disbelief and just let him punch someone and
move on but it drives me nuts how casual people can be with punching and receiving the punch.
Often times in movies and TV shows someone get punched - gets punched and then you see
them a few hours later in the movie in the in their timeline and there's just a little
bit of bruising...
it's like, "you just got punched by Sylvester Stallone or Rambo - your face would be swollen.
You would - you - you're hurting really bad right now" drives me up the wall but a one
are going to be joint injuries say like to the shoulder area.
Now, this is what we call the pectoral girdle and that's just going to be the clavicle or
your collar bone as most people will call it, then we also have this longer bone here
called the humerus and then behind it, what most people will call the shoulder blade but
this is really the scapular bone.
You have to understand that these are barely attached to your body.
The only bone on bone contact is going to be here where the clavicle is meeting with
the sternum and we call this the sternoclavicular joint.
All the other attachments are going to be muscular attachments.
Picture like in movies, say someone's falling and our hero reaches out and grabs them just
in time.
Their arms extend.
There's a lot of pressure.
There's a lot of screaming.
The amount of pressure and pulling and just pulling forces on both of their shoulder joints
is extraordinary.
Muscles are going to be tearing.
Cartilage like the labrum that goes around the shoulder joint itself is going to be tearing,
right?
Unless you have some kind of connective tissue disorder, your joints aren't meant to just
dislocate and then pop back into place and everything is fine.
Dislocations come with consequences and all this pulling or even pushing.
Maybe they land strange on their, you know, on their arms like this.
That's going to cause pressure in the elbows.
That's going to cause pressure in the sternoclavicular joint.
All of these come with consequences and potential fractures.
It's out of control.
Just think about how many times you've seen in action movies, people jump - even if it's
10, 15, 20 feet land.
Sure, they do a role but even if they're avoiding an explosion like we already discussed, that's
one problem...
now their joints are all being smashed into one another, it creates chaos.
The fact is, your body breaks pretty easily because that's a better alternative than having
organs rupture or things of those lines.
So what will happen is bones will break to help to dissipate force.
But again, none of this makes for a good action sequence if our hero jumps epically and breaks
six bones and is now laying there in immense pain.
The third and final type of injury that just bugs me are going to be penetrating injuries
or penetrating traumas such as say like a gunshot or a stabbing or something along those
lines.
Now, for the head, a lot of those action sequences are pretty accurate in terms of it's just
- if it happens, it happens and things are pretty much over from there but other places
not so much.
I mean, again, if we focus here on the abdomen, if you get shot in the belly, you may live
a decent of time - that can happen for sure but I don't think they really accurately represent
just how problematic this is in terms of now you have digestive material going into the
abdominal cavity or if it ruptures the colon like here in the ascending colon, you could
have feces entering into the abdominal cavity and you are going to go septic.
Like we mentioned, the spleen here is a blood reservoir so, if this gets shot, that's a
big problem - you're going to be bleeding out into your abdominal cavity, right?
Pretty much anywhere that - that gets shot here is going to have a severe issue.
I mean, if it goes back and hits the vertebral column or your spinal column, the bullet can
then ricochet and go into several different places.
So - but I think movies do a reasonable job of that but still a lot of times, I'll see,
you know, the hero get shot and it maybe it goes right through like the side, maybe like
right around here and they just kind of again, treat it as a flesh wound and walk it off.
Not so much because you're going to have several blood vessels, the muscles have been shot
and are now injured and are going to start to contract and that's something you gotta
understand.
Even say, if you get shot - let me grab this over here - in an arm.
So, I'm about to show a hand.
There's going to be some fingers on here.
So, if this is something you don't want to see, please look away right now, but I have
a right upper limb here.
Let's say you get shot or stabbed or injured just in the limb and this is where you typically
see in a lot of action sequences it describe as a flesh mode, right?
It goes through the arm, they put a bandage around it, and they call it a day.
Well, you have to understand that first off, when you shoot muscle tissue, the muscle is
now injured in a way that it doesn't want to continue contracting.
So, any more additional movement, it's going to be problematic.
The body is naturally going to lock it down to prevent you from moving further because
that further movement can create more problems and more injuries.
The next thing to understand is that running throughout your entire body are blood vessels,
your circulatory system.
Now, if we go to this medial view, hopefully you'll be able to see this, this muscle here
is called biceps brachii.
Well, underneath it, there are series of blood vessels called the brachial artery and the
brachial vein and several nerves that are going to be going in this area, right?
Those - if those get ruptured, you are now bleeding out inside of your arm.
This is a very severe problem.
I mean, you could very easily lose the limb due to a gunshot.
This flesh wound could mean you lose your arm and if you don't address it quickly enough
or in the correct way, you may lose your life.
The same goes for the forearm or the antebrachium even.
There are gigantic blood vessels traveling through here.
But look how complex the hand is.
Alright, so let me turn this around.
You can see the back of the hand.
I mean, the complexity in here, they should - you're not going to have any function if
this gets injured.
The same would go for the foot.
You can think of the foot being very similar but there's also going to be a great amount
of blood vessels and nerves travelling through here.
All of these are extremely severe injuries but again, they're treated as though they're
just flesh wounds and it bothers me.
Look, I'm not suggesting that every movie needs to become hyper realistic to the point
where they just become not - no fun but I also think that maybe sort of if you're putting
in millions of dollars into the production value of this, a few extra minutes of Googling
might help with the enjoyment factor.
Thanks for watching everybody.
I hope you enjoy the video.
Be sure to click the link in the description below and you can start enjoying some tasty
breakfast cereal from Magic Spoon.
As always, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe if you feel inclined to do so but I will see
you as will Geoffrey in the next video.