MedPol: Battlefield Medicine

Kevin Drum blogs about surgical advancements in the Iraq war:

The New England Journal of Medicine has an interesting article this week about battlefield medicine. It turns out that although the Iraq War so far has produced as many injuries as the Revolutionary War or the first five years of the Vietnam War, it's produced far fewer deaths. Only 10% of injured soldiers have died, which is down not just from wars 200 years ago, but also from the 24% death rate in the Gulf War just a decade ago.

Fun stuff ensues.

Update: the author of this study is apparently Atul Gawande, Harvard surgical resident, New Yorker writer, and author of the most awesome medical narrative: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science.

Update 1.5: Here's the actual NEJM paper.

Update 2: and of course, don't question the ability of Rush to take good news and use it against Democrats:

LIMBAUGH: There is an enormous cost to saving lives. We may have to rethink this, ladies and gentlemen, because there is an enormous cost here to saving lives. We're "creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans, and a severe shortage of military surgeons" because they're all on the front lines saving lives. That's not good? What in the world are we talking about? Should we let them die?

The answer to this is they're just livid -- the press, the leftists in this country are just upset that there are not enough deaths to get people outraged and protesting in the streets against the war. They're mad that these doctors are saving lives. They want deaths! They've been counting deaths up to 1,000, they hoped that would get Bush out of office. They still want Bush out of office; make no mistake about it. They still want Bush discredited and it's all part of coming back in '06 and '08, and so there are too many lives being saved over there. These lives in old wars, they would have died.

These soldiers in old wars would have died, like Vietnam, and we would have had people protesting in the streets but now these surgeons are saving too many lives. There aren't enough deaths so people aren't gonna be mad! It makes total sense to me. In fact, it's sort of like the left complaining when you tell them crime is down.

Remember one of the things I warned you about the Democrats? Bad news for America is good news for them; good news for America, bad news for them. They've doubled their bets. It's gotten to the point now where the more deaths in Iraq the better for them, they think. The more lives saved in Iraq, the bigger the problem for them.

What a douche bag!