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The other big difference is that the medical stuff is pH balanced so it doesn't damage tissues. Some glues are downright toxic to disrupted skin. Aside from being very painful, it can actually lead to increased swelling, scarring, and difficulty with wound healing. Oh...and application of strong glues over an area before it's been cleaned properly massively increases your chances of locking in bacteria that cause infection. This is particularly bad for marine cuts that often involve bacteria that don't like oxygen (anaerobes). Even with the medical grade stuff, best to know what you are doing before slathering something on an open wound!
Sorry for the late reply...didn't get a notification about this post. Anyway, I have used dermabond quite a bit, but it's really not a good choice for what you described for several reasons. It's really only designed to function like liquid stitches, to be used for superficial closure of outer layers of otherwise intact skin. All it does is holds skin together in an a position that allows it to heal. It's not really designed to work as a skin replacement in the case of avulsion injuries, and it really doesn't have any clotting properties that would help stop blood loss from an amputation or avulsion type injury. Your best friend there is direct pressure on the wound to get the bleeding to stop, then a dressing over the wound once the bleeding is controlled. Even in the case of deep lacerations with lots of bleeding, when I put in stitches, a deeper layer is needed to control bleeding. That's the surgical version of applying pressure to the wound. Simply closing up the skin over heavily bleeding wounds doesn't fix the problem.
