Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: City's gun violence goes beyond murder

[billbuckhead]

City's gun violence goes beyond murder

First-rate trauma care keeps homicides from spiraling even higher

By JOHN FAUBER and JOHN DIEDRICH
[e-mail]

Posted: Nov. 11, 2006

UNCOUNTED: Surviving Gunshots, Paying the Price
(First of three parts)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Froedtert is on pace to treat 459 shooting patients in its trauma center by year's end, a 34% increase over last year. Through September, Children's Hospital was running 38% ahead of last year, when it treated 110 young gunshot victims.

Researchers say paramedics, doctors and nurses have become so good at preventing shootings from becoming deaths that the homicide rate is no longer an accurate barometer of violence.

These urban medics save thousands of people who are shot every year in cities around the country, using techniques that were honed in war zones from Vietnam to the Middle East.

Now their own innovations are helping their military counterparts save the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Advances in emergency medical care over the last 40 years are responsible nationally for 30,000 to 50,000 fewer homicides annually, a study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded in 2002."
------------------------snip---------------------------------
<http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=529910>

Very eye opening. Good to know that emergency room docs are getting battlefield training right here in America.

[thingfisher]

1. America has always

been good at treating the symptoms and not the disease!