one factor that helped them save lives

[sheshe2]

How Bombs in Iraq Saved Lives in Boston
10 years of IEDs and shrapnel wounds taught surgeons critical lessons about trauma—and tourniquets.

Area hospitals treated 187 people for injuries related to the blast, including more than a dozen in critical conduction. Because the blast originated from a device placed on the ground, most of the injuries were to the lower body, rather than the head or abdomen. Some of the wounded, like Jeff Bauman, the man carried to safety by Iraq War activist Carlos Arredondo, lost limbs in the explosion; at least 10 people had amputations.

SNIP:

But military doctors soon found that when applied correctly and in the right situation, tourniquets pay enormous dividends—dropping the mortality rate in such instances from 90 percent to 10 percent. Now they're standard procedure among first responders. (The bleeding in Bauman's legs, for instance, was kept in check by a hand-made tourniquet made from a shirt.)

SNIP:

Likewise, doctors in Iraq soon discovered that the conventional wisdom on how to stop blood loss in a trauma victim was basically backwards. For about half a century, doctors had relied mostly on red blood cells and crystalloid fluids. But when Jenkins was deployed to Oman in 2002, he and his colleagues began using a different formula, in which there was a much higher rate of plasma. "If you gave blood transfusions the old way, the mortality rate approached 70 percent," he said. "But if you did it in that 1 to 1 approach, the mortality approached 20 percent." Their policies were soon adopted by trauma centers back in the States.

"It wasn't really until the armed services started doing that as a concerted effort in the Middle East that we realized how much the early use of blood...changes things in a number of ways," Hauser says.

On a more logistical level, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, hospitals in Boston adopted a basic tactic from Iraq to eliminate any unnecessary confusion as to which patients needed which kind of care. As the Times explained, surgeons "used felt markers to write patients' vital signs and injuries on their chests—safely away from the leg wounds—so that if a patient’s chart was misplaced during a transfer to surgery or intensive care, for example, there would be no question about what was found in the emergency room." But the largest benefit of the war experience may have been training.

Read all of it here:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/how-war-terror-helped-boston-keep-its-death-toll-down

It's not a war that we asked for, nor one that we condoned. It was an ignorant and wasteful war. Our soldiers were maimed or died. Men, women and children of Iraq and Afghanistan suffered the same fate.
I weep for all of them.

Out of the depth of despair that the wars have cost us, so many lives to change forever, one light appeared from all the carnage. A way to heal. Without that knowledge more lives would have been lost.

We need to educate ourselves. We need to move forward.

Peace

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. The discussion of what solution is used has been going forever

I see things have gone back to plasma.

[Hekate]

2. Peace, sheshe

[sheshe2]

3. It was Tough Ruck.

There was a group of soldiers, Hekate. They walked for those that had fallen in the wars. It was symbolic.

They were there at the end, to help once again those that had fallen.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022696134

?



Twenty six miles, leaving Hopkinton at 5:30. Carrying 40 pound packs.

[Cha]

4. Thanks, she.. sorry I missed this

the first time around.

"A way to heal"

[sheshe2]

5. Thanks Cha...

They were awesome that day.