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

Some lessons in military medicine can only be learned from the litter. For Green Beret combat medic Luke Sciulli, that lesson arrived when a booby-trapped building in Helmand Province collapsed on him and turned the medic into the patient. What followed reshaped how he thinks about casualty care, recovery, and the future of battlefield medicine. The Day Everything Changed On January 18, 2018, Sciulli was running a personnel-recovery operation out of a Taliban-controlled priso

A career in military medicine can offer purpose, leadership, and clinical breadth that civilian paths rarely match — but the route in is poorly understood. In this WarDocs episode, COL Danielle Holt, MD, Associate Dean of Admissions and Recruitment at the USU School of Medicine, opens the door. A Career Built Across Two Identities Holt’s path runs from ROTC and a general surgery residency at Tripler Army Medical Center to duty stations as different as rural Fort Wainwright, A