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Some of the brightest and best scientific professionals in Texas gathered in San Antonio last week to discuss innovations in military health care. More from TPR’s Terry Gildea.
January 11, 2010 · The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas was founded in 2004 to bring together the state’s top achievers. Recently they converged on San Antonio to offer advice on how the military can improve their healthcare on and off the battlefield. Dr. Paul Carlton is a former Surgeon General for the U.S. Air Force. He now works at the Texas A&M Health Science Center.
“If you compare this to WWII, if you compare it to Vietnam, even, we’re doing much, much better. In WWII, twenty five percent of those wounded, died. Today we’re running ten percent. They’re wounding us much more effectively, we’re countering it more effectively,” said Carlton.
Carlton and other physicians from around the state used the conference as an opportunity to look at what’s working in civilian trauma care and how those procedures could improve military medicine, and not just physical trauma. Dr Alan Peterson is a professor of psychiatry at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. He’s interested in improving care for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Right now, at least in civilians, exposure therapy treatments are the ones that have the most evidence for their ethicacy. And so we’re looking at what treatments have worked in a civilian setting and trying to now do military studies to see if these two leading candidate treatments will work with a military population,” said Peterson.
Wounded service members are surviving more today because of comprehensive care from the moment the trauma occurs through the end of the recovery period. Dr. John Holcomb works at the UT Health Science Center in Houston. He says the battlefield medic must be as effective as the therapist during recovery.
“If you just improve just one part without improving the others, then the outcome at the end is probably not going to be as optimal as if you improve every one of the steps along the way."
All three physicians are retired military officers and they hope conferences like this one will give wounded warriors the opportunity to receive the very best treatment options available.
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