Military medicine has spent two decades getting very good at the individual patient. COL Donald J. Kosiak, MD, thinks that is exactly the problem. At the Defense Strategies Institute Operational Medicine Symposium in San Antonio, he put the question plainly: what does a physician do with six thousand burn patients? The Eaches Versus the Thousands COL Kosiak calls it the trap of the eaches. A panel will spend an hour on a cold weather injury, a complex burn, a patient who need

Norway fields a small military. It also flew more than 3,500 wounded patients out of Ukraine without losing one in the air. Brig. Gen. Petter Iversen, M.D., who runs that medical service, sat down with WarDocs at the Defense Strategies Institute Operational Medicine Symposium and made an argument the rest of the Alliance needs to hear. The Problem Is Capacity, Not Competence Brig. Gen. Iversen is Surgeon General of the Norwegian Armed Forces and chairs the NATO Committee

Retired Navy Captain Gerard CAPT(Ret) Cox, MD, held the black bag a few seconds from two presidents, ran medical support for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and walked into the VA Office of the Medical Inspector three months after the worst scandal in that agency's modern history. Thirty years in uniform and nearly eleven more in senior VA leadership gave him an unusual vantage point, and his career argues that the hardest problems in military medicine are cultural, not clinical. An ac

When a trauma patient is bleeding from a vessel no surgeon's hand can reach, someone calls interventional radiology. In this companion conversation to their earlier episode, host and vascular surgeon Dr. Wayne Causey asks Dr. John Pavlus, Chief of Interventional Radiology at Brooke Army Medical Center, to skip the overview and walk through exactly what happens next. The Scan Comes First Before anything is touched, there is a picture. Contrast is injected and the scanner t

Dr. Pavlus Dr. Schutt Bleeding is what kills people after trauma. That blunt fact anchors a WarDocs conversation between host Dr. Wayne Causey, a vascular surgeon, and two military interventional radiologists — Dr. John Pavlus of Brooke Army Medical Center and Dr. Jonathon Schutt, an interventional radiology resident at Yale. Their subject is endovascular care, and their argument is that the military has a life-saving capability it has not yet pushed close

The golden hour was a promise military medicine could keep in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a future large-scale conflict, it may not be a promise anyone can make. COL Shaun Brown, MD, Commander of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, sat down with WarDocs and OpMed TV at the Defense Strategies Institute OP MED Symposium to explain what that means for the research enterprise he leads. A Rejection, Then September 11th COL Brown planned to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. Bad