Troops dying from battlefield injuries cut in half

Thanks to refinements in medical care.

Those include: damage-control surgery, limb and abdomen incisions, external fixators, critical care air transport, formal trauma systems and concurrent process improvement.

Damage-control surgery has had as much as an effect of saving lives of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan as anything else, Dorlac said. Nowhere were the benefits of damage-control surgery more apparent than in Fallujah, Iraq, during November 2004. The Navy Forward Surgical Team there performed damage-control surgery on casualties, Dorlac said.

“They had huge numbers of patients and managed all those guys with perfect damage-control principles,” he said. “By doing that, for their Marines, I think they had a zero-mortality rate in theater.”

In damage-control surgery, surgeons treat only a patient’s most critical problems and get that patient out of surgery so he or she can receive additional treatment at a medical facility with more assets.