Wartime Medicine

Medicine in the context of war spurs innovation while staying streamlined and minimalist. Several mainstays of modern medicine have been developed because of battlefield medicine - the concept of triage was beget by the need to do the greatest good for the greatest number of casualties on the battlefield when resources were overwhelmed, the modern blood bank and the use of morphine for pain management emerged out of necessity in WWII, and the use of air medevac by helicopter began to be implemented in the Korean War. Medicine in the military is a trial by fire; war produces trauma with mechanisms of injury often unseen in the civilian world - and military physicians and their teams have to manage these extreme cases with limited resources, producing new technology, protocols, and procedures.

Modern war medicine has produced a new kind of progession in the care of critically wounded soldiers in the form of "damage control", where performing the minimum intervention necessary for stabilization is preferred to immediately doing everything possible. Forward Surgical Teams (FST's) follow closely behind combat troops and are able to deploy a functioning hospital with surgical suites in an hour with just a handful of backpacks. They are the first point of surgical intervention following EMS battlefield casualty evacuation, and they exist to stabilize casualties until they can receive definitive care at a later point. The frequent major traumas caused by recent prolonged wars, though tragic, have spurred changes in protocols that will improve outcomes for all. For example, the onslaught of severe limb injuries in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that rapid, appropriate tourniquet use can significantly improve mortality. Improvements in extrication and transport time in battlefield medicine have encouraged their use. In civilian emergency medicine, the use of tourniquets is discouraged and used only as a last resort to control bleeding. In cases such as these, wartime medicine can overturn conventional medical wisdom.