Thursday, April 16, 2009

I have a question

So.

I watched a movie yesterday which involved a member of a triad sticking a shovel into someone's forearm and effectively severing it.

My question is, how easy is it to amputate someone's limbs? With a shovel? Or even a knife?

In movies all they seem to do is swipe a shovel/long sword/knife/hell even a claymore through it and voila. Operation complete.

During my trauma attachment (the whole one day of it) someone came in who required his entire arm amputated thanks to IV drug use, but I never got to see the operation, let alone see the man, because he was too sick and arrested a couple of times.

And I never quite got round to asking the butcher on the psych ward how he self amputated his finger. Because, how do you ask someone, "Hey there, how did you go about trying to cut your pinky off?"

Personally from experience from orthopaedic surgery you require a lot more than just a plain sword and biceps of steel to cut through flesh and bone in a single swift swipe. A lot more hacking is required.

And it's helpful to have an electric saw or a guillotine maybe.

Anyways.

What is your take on on-screen amputation? Plausible? Complete lies? Don't really care?

I'd like to know.

4 comments:

saru-kun said...

There's been documented test cutting of swords going through 3 human bodies...across the chest.

So I guess a limb or two wouldn't be that much of a problem gua

Cyclonova said...

On-screen limb-severing FTW!

Films like 300 and Final Destination would've been crap without em

June said...

Was it the shinjuku incident? that scene was in the movie.. Yeah i tot it was illogical too, hey i've never seen it before in the gazillion trauma cases here at our uni... ^.^

The Poor Medic said...

Yeah it was Shinjuku Incident =.=