Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has found.
But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
So….it’s bad that soldiers are surviving wounds that would have killed them before?
The article says that the 10 percent rate of this war beats handily the 24 percent rate of the Gulf War. That, to me, is damned good news. It means that fewer of our soldiers are dying. But fomr reading this article, their survival seems like bad news.
During the Vietnam War, it took injured soldiers an average of 45 days to reach a hospital in the United States. At the beginning of the Iraq war, the average was eight days, and now it is four. One airman hit by a mortar attack in September “was on the operating table at Walter Reed” Army Medical Center here “just 36 hours later,” Gawande said.
The battlefield triage is called “damage control” because the emphasis is on stopping bleeding, keeping a patient warm and leaving almost everything else to doctors at a permanent hospital.
“The combination of Kevlar vests and a system that allows them to stop the bleeding makes it possible for them to survive injuries that were unsurvivable before,” he said. “How you rehabilitate physically, let alone emotionally, someone who has that kind of loss is a serious question.”
This amazes me. We can get a seriously wouded soldier from a battlefield halfway across the world into a top-flight operating room in a day and a half. We ought to be exceedingly happy that we have developed the technology and the systems in our military that can save lives.
And yes, how to rehabilitate a serious injury is a serious question. But it’s not as serious as dealing with the soldier’s death, is it? I certainly don’t think it is.
The article that you are quoting is reporting facts, and perhaps trying to elicit a discussion or draw attention to a need, but it doesn’t seem to me that the author is making any judgements. You, on the other hand are reading more into the author’s intentions than his words allow.
Ooh, that sounds remarkably similar to the comment I made yesterday. Probably just a coincidence….
I have ti disagree a bit. The beginning of the second paragraph says that our being able to save lives produces “an enormous cost”. I, personally, would think that costs less, in many ways, than the cost borne by having all those people die.
Given the headline, I would certainly have expected most of the article to deal with how we’ve managed to get such a low death rate among our soldiers. Instead, most of the story deals with the “enormous cost” of having soldiers rehabilitate serious wounds.
But I would think that if you were to weigh the costs of those people rehabilitating their wounds or their dying, the latter would prove far more costly in many ways. Given that, it seems a bit slanted to me for the author to say that having soldiers live is “an enourmous cost” as opposed to saying that we’re paying a lesser cost than having them all die.
OOh, EricH, which comment are you referring to? Jimmie’s or mine?