There are also cases, particularly in war zones, where people get rockets and grenades fired into them that fail to detonate on impact, in which case they do need to get the projectile taken out asap. Consequently, the new medical advice is to remove bullets if doing so does not create much additional risk. Similarly, today, bullets still usually contain lead, and studies released in the mid-2010s show that over the long term, bullets left in people's bodies do cause long-term lead poisoning. note A) because you'd wash your under-pants and under-shirt, if you had any, instead of the outer clothes and B) because most dyes would dissolve in water and/or soap, which was bad news if you wanted to look good/were relying on the colour of your clothes to help other soldiers identify which country you were fighting for Plus, people often instinctively want to get rid of foreign metal objects causing pain. The bullet would thus have been extracted as part of recovering the clothing fragments, since cloth in a wound was a good way for the wound to get infected - especially historically, as since most soldiers (and civilians, for that matter) had just one set of clothes which they wore constantly without washing them. Between the round shape and the slow speed, most bullets were liable to drag shreds of the victim's clothing into the wound (unlike modern weapons, whose bullets generally snap right through). Moreover, the ball would have been moving much more slowly than a modern bullet, as the bullet was a spherical ball, firearms used black powder (which explodes less energetically than the smokeless powder used in modern ammunition), and the seal between the bullet and the barrel of the gun was looser. Removing a bullet may harm the patient in several ways, but chiefly in that the bullet may be pressed against a damaged blood vessel, and removing it may cause severe bleeding.ĭepending on the time period, however, this can be a Justified Trope historically, a musket ball was made out of lead and would be toxic if left inside. Bullets are, once they stop moving, largely harmless, and trauma surgeons frequently leave them in place while repairing the damage inflicted by their ingress. Unfortunately, this is most often a seriously bad idea, as the very last thing you would want to do to help a shooting victim would be to pull the bullet out. It is easy to see why any series which involves gun play eventually includes a sequence in which a professional or amateur field medic applies a little bullet withdrawal to his or her comrade-in-arms. Even better, it requires only simple tools, little expertise, and is intensely painful (thus allowing the bullet recipient to demonstrate his or her heroic pain tolerance). Having a bullet dug out of a character's flesh or bone is almost as dramatic as the shooting itself.
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