Medical Advances Help Bring Soldiers Home

BOSTON -- Twelve years can make a big difference when it comes to saving lives.

NewsCenter 5's Liz Brunner reported that since the Persian Gulf War, advances in techniques and technologies will no doubt help doctors on the battlefields get more soldiers in his war home safely.

If you were wounded during the Gulf War, the nearest medical care probably was a makeshift MASH unit miles away.

"The current concept of warfare is to move fast and to move distances," Boston Medical Center Dr. Edwin Hirsch said.

But Hirsch, who served as a reserve naval officer during that war, said that this time it's different. In Iraq, so much ground is being covered that medics, in small teams of about 20, must be right on the front line. They've been trained to be mobile at a moment's notice and to conserve resources.

"You have to train people to work in that environment, because if you're used to working at a big hospital where you're used to opening a drawer and get something else out forever it becomes different when you have limited resources and you have no resupply for 48 hours," Hirsch said.

As a result, medical devices are now smaller and lighter. There are also newer antibiotics, blood clot medicines and emergency medical supplies. Dr. Steve Schwaitzberg also served during the first Gulf war.

"There's been a lot of excellent technology that's been developed in the last decade for freezing blood -- (like) bandages that control bleeding better than before. And so our ability to keep our soldier's alive in the field has never been better," Schwaitzberg said.

One new technology being used in Iraq is software designed by a Hudson company called Skyscape. The tiny computers can store multiple textbooks, including all military medical procedures, in one handheld device.

Closer to home, Skyscape is helping air ambulances like Med-Flight quickly research rare illnesses, calculate how much IV fluid is needed in particular case, and watch for drug interactions. Bill Cyr said that he can see why it would serve a critical purpose on the battlefield.

"They don't have the ability to carry reference material with them, so to look something up on the battlefield, they're able to reach into their pocket and use the PDA to do that," Cyr said.

Something we don't think about are soldiers who have non-war related medical problems -- like one Marine who needed his appendix out in the midst of warfare.

Schweitzberg said that medical hospitals overseas are, in this war, performing the latest surgical techniques to keep soldiers safe and recovery time short.

"When you have 400,000 or 250,000 young people, they get appendicitis, they get colicisticis, and so you still need to perform all of those procedures. Minimally invasive surgery could allow a soldier to return to the battlefront much more quickly than if they," Schweitzberg said.

What is not yet ready for the battlefield is high-tech telemedicine -- the ability to beam-in the expertise of specialists from anywhere in the world. Also still to come are surgeons who can operate on patients from miles away via robots. These techniques, said Schweitzberg, could be available to the military in the next couple of years.