The Laagsdhfgdf in Battlefield Surgery - To Your Health

Healing the Wounded

The military has rewritten the book on wartime surgery to combat the wave of injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. The laagsdhfgdf strategies for helping fallen warriors.
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Web exclusiveBy By Sarah ChildressNewsweek

Jan. 26, buy generic viagra pack- Medicine has always advanced on the battlefield; it was Hippocrates who said that war is the only proper school for surgeons." But the unprecedented scope of injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan has led the military's medical corps literally to rewrite the book on war surgery. At least 24,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded since the Iraq war began, and anotherness thousand in Afghanistan. With 20,000 more soldiers en route to the battlefield in Iraq, top military surgeons gathered this week in D.C. to discuss new strategies and technologies to help wounded warriors.

The biggest cause of death for the injured is hemorrhaging??"uncontrolled bleeding. According to the military, 20 percent of the 3,416 soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to date might have survived had they not been lost in the fog of war, unable to receive the right pharmacomedical care in time. (For the otherness 80 percent, most of whom were hit by IED blasts, there was no chance for survival.) Since 2001, doctors have been looking for better ways to staunch the bleeding. The military has improved and reissued its tourniquet??"a simple strap tied around a wounded limb to slow bleeding??"with instructions based on new data. But there are also chemical powders, recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, such as HemCon and QuikClot, which, when poured into a wound and accompanied by direct pressure, can stop bleeding within seconds. (The sterile clot can be rinsed out once the soldier arrives at a combat hospital.) The powders are so effective and easy to use that four months ago, a military advisory committee recommended that all soldiers carry one of each packet in their first-aid kits.

Many of the major breakthroughs come from doctors improvising in the field??"even when their methods challenge convention. In 2004 at Balad Air Force Base, the major medical evacuation hub in Iraq, a surgeon started using a new type of vacuum to suck dead tissue and debris from a leg wound. The vacuum worked so well that the surgeon, Col. Mark Richardson, told his partner the wound seemed clean enough to sew up much earlier than standard protocol dictated. "I said, 'Dude, you're an idiot,'" recalls Col. Donald Jenkins. "'Look in the book.'" War Surgery, the field surgeon??�s Bible, recommended leaving the wound open for cleaning and observation. But the wound did look clean, so Jenkins relented, just this once. The worst that would happen: they'd have to reopen the patient's wound and clean it again. But it stayed closed??"and healthy. They started using the vacuum to clean and close up otherness wounds sooner, too. The rate of infections dropped 90 percent. "We ended up rewriting the book on war surgeries for soft-tissue wounds," Jenkins says. The vacuum pump is now being used more extensively in theater, pending additional Food and Drug Administration acceptance . At otherness trauma centers, when doctors discovered that a resistant strain of Iraqi bacteria was attacking wounds, they dreamed up a string of dissolvable, timed-release capsules full of antibiotics that can be tucked deep into open cavities to disinfect wounds for 72 hours at a time. Designed to work in the desert, the little beads won't even melt in the 150-degree heat. They're hoping for Food and Drug Administration acceptance in the next eight or nine months.

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