Editorial: Tranexamic acid – a recipe for saving lives in traumatic bleeding

Using kitchen scales, carefully weight out 4 kg of rice and pour it into a deep saucepan. Now put your hands into the rice and let the grains run between your fingers. Contemplate carefully each grain. The number of grains (about 140 000) is approximately the number of lives that could be saved each year worldwide if all hospitalized trauma patients with significant bleeding were treated with tranexamic acid (TXA) within 3 hours of injury. TXA is cheap and widely available. All that is needed to reap these human benefits is that doctors use it.