| Atticus Grinch |
04-16-2013 04:35 PM |
Re: Towards A Virtual Williamsburg!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan
(Post 478393)
A few months ago, I had reason to view dozens of x-rays of patients with orthopaedic injuries in the lower extremities. They were usualy the result of car crashes, and there were a depressing number of birthdates in the 1980s and 1990s. I also had to go through a ton of powerpoint presentations showing how to fix some of these injuries. Pretty damned gruesome stuff. Later, I chatted with the trauma surgeon who took care of the patients, and he explained that what I had seen was not that bad. He'd been in Germany a few years earlier at one of the bases where US soldiers get flown immediately after being blown up. The advances in trauma in the last few years have been pretty amazing, and docs who've trained in the field have become particularly adept at dealing with blown to bits, er, bits. As horrific and pointless as the wars have been, I suppose it's a good thing that our docs have become very, very good at putting people back together again.
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In the mid '90s I heard a rumor that the Army had leveraged the hospitals around South Central L.A. as a proving ground for best practices in AR gunshot wound treatment, and that the gang wars there had made our military trauma surgeons best-in-class at reassembling people turned to pulp by multiple gunshots (which are hard to come by in the clinical context). Too bad the major conflict for which they were ultimately trained involved more closed-head injuries and TBI than GSWs.
When my woo-woo friends talk about the wisdom of Eastern medicine, I always ask them which hemisphere they'd rather need a trauma medic in. Ain't no herbal cure for yesterday's horror. |
