Many, if not most, of the recent improvements in trauma care in civilian practice have developed from military experience. The British Defence Medical Services have been recognised as providers of exemplary health care. Although there will is an emphasis on trauma, this book also captures lessons from internal medicine and infectious disease, ethics (for example dealing with detainees - a particularly controversial subject), human factors, mental health issues and rehabilitation.Military Medicine provides the evidence and context for these innovations, and its unique and important account will be of interest to both military and civilian practitioners alike.

Nearly 1.9 million U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since October 2001. Many service members and veterans face serious challenges in readjusting to normal life after returning home. This initial book presents findings on the most critical challenges, and lays out the blueprint for the second phase of the study to determine how best to meet the needs of returning troops and their families.

Specialty Volume of Textbooks of Military Medicine. TMM. Edited by Shawn Christian Nessen, Dave Edmond Lounsbury, and Stephen P. Hetz. Foreword by Bob Woodruff. Prepared especially for medical personnel. Provides the fundamental principles and priorities critical in managing the trauma of modern warfare. Contains concise supplemental material for military surgeons deploying or preparing to deploy to a combat theater.

Out of the Crucible: How the U.S. Military Transformed Combat Casualty Care in Iraq and Afghanistan edited by Arthur L. Kellermann, MD and MPH, and Eric Elster, MD is now available by the US Army, Borden Institute. This comprehensive resource, part of the renowned Textbooks of Military Medicine series, documents one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of American medicine - the dramatic advances in combat casualty care developed during Operations Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Each chapter is written by one or more military health professionals who played an important role in bringing the advancement to America's military health system. Written in plain English and amply illustrated with informative figures and photographs, Out of the Crucible engages and informs the American public and policy makers about how America's military health system, devised, tested and widely adopted numerous inventions, innovations, technologies that collectively produced the highest survival rate from battlefield trauma in the history of warfare.

Provides a detailed look at how war affects human life and health far beyond the battlefield Since 2010, a team of activists, social scientists, and physicians have monitored the lives lost as a result of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through an initiative called the Costs of War Project. Unlike most studies of war casualties, this research looks beyond lives lost in violence to consider those who have died as a result of illness, injuries, and malnutrition that would not have occurred had the war not taken place. Incredibly, the Cost of War Project has found that, of the more than 1,000,000 lives lost in the recent US wars, a minimum of 800,000 died not from violence, but from indirect causes. War and Health offers a critical examination of these indirect casualties, examining health outcomes on the battlefield and elsewhere—in hospitals, homes, and refugee camps—both during combat and in the years following, as communities struggle to live normal lives despite decimated social services, lack of access to medical care, ongoing illness and disability, malnutrition, loss of infrastructure, and increased substance abuse. The volume considers the effect of the war on both civilians and on US service members, in war zones—where healthcare systems have been destroyed by long-term conflict—and in the United States, where healthcare is highly developed. Ultimately, it draws much-needed attention to the far-reaching health consequences of the recent US wars, and argues that we cannot go to war—and remain at war—without understanding the catastrophic effect war has on the entire ecosystem of human health.

Many veterans returning from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have health problems they believe are related to their exposure to the smoke from the burning of waste in open-air "burn pits" on military bases. Particular controversy surrounds the burn pit used to dispose of solid waste at Joint Base Balad in Iraq, which burned up to 200 tons of waste per day in 2007. The Department of Veterans Affairs asked the IOM to form a committee to determine the long-term health effects from exposure to these burn pits. Insufficient evidence prevented the IOM committee from developing firm conclusions. This report, therefore, recommends that, along with more efficient data-gathering methods, a study be conducted that would evaluate the health status of service members from their time of deployment over many years to determine their incidence of chronic diseases.