Reply #60: Wendy's. And mostly it goes the OTHER way.

[panzerfaust]

"They are using trauma patients, without their specific consent, to compile data that will be used to advance trauma medicine to be used in wartime, on the battlefield"

It is the reverse. Most trauma research is done where there is the most, and the most unbelievably horrific, trauma and that is in a theater of war. What is learned there is applied here ‘back in the world’.

This has always been true, ranging from looking at anesthesia and asepsis (Crimea), delayed amputation, malarial phrophylaxis (The War Between the States: 'The Civil War' damnyankees call it), to the Hare Traction Splint in WWI (aka "The War to End All Wars), and the use of steel rod/plate fixation of fractures, plasma transfusion, antibiotics, intravenous anesthetics (WW2), rapid battle field air-evac, early blood transfusion (Korea), massive fluid resuscitation, early excision of severe burn wounds, delayed closure of contaminated wounds (all in Viet-Nam).

The DOD is much less worried about the ethics of their studies than is the civilian world.

Two examples.

First the Army is currently studying the effects of a blood-clotting agent called “Activated Factor 7.” The specifics about how it works are not important here, but one of the side effects – increased risk of clotting throughout the vasculature system – is, since this can be as fatal as bleeding to death.

It is not yet known if the risk of using this drug offsets the benefits, and it is being very widely used in Iraq – too widely many, including myself, feel. There is also the undisputed fact that the drug costs about $10,000 per DOSE.

The other is personal.

When I was in the service I was looking over my medical record one day, and discovered that I had, unknowingly, been a subject in a study undertaken when I was in boot camp. I have no idea WHAT the experiment was, and, when I started asking up the chain (of command), my medical record was ‘lost’ by my unit.

I do know that I was 17 at the time. I do know that I came down with a serious pneumonia for which I was hospitalized for two weeks – worse, I thus was ‘set back’ for an extra two weeks in boot camp.

I have often wondered if the two were related. Pneumonia, whilst not unheard of, is uncommon in healthy 17 year olds.

This being Memorial Day, y’all might want to visit a program the LA Times has put up. It is the least (but still heavily) sanitized look into the faces of the wounded.

At least of wounded Americans. No pictures of the shredded Iraqi and Afghan women and children. When a friend of mine was in Afghanistan, he said the 1/3 of the casualties were children.

One Third Were Children.