Northern Michigan's News LeaderHealthy Living: Gun Toting Doctors

Doctors and nurses who volunteer for service are required to get a taste of the battlefield before they head to hospitals near war zones. They only have days to train for what they might encounter. And what they learn from the military... may be the opposite of what they're taught in school. Robyn Haines has more in Healthy Living.

For one week, groups of military doctors and nurses go through the high-intensity combat casualty care course.  Hospital corpsman Brian Powers says the point is to raise their stress levels to help them deal with mass casualties during deployment. Because blood is not readily available at combat hospitals, they also stress hemorrhage control. Powers says that's because troops can die from bleeding in under two minutes, he tells us you have four to six minutes to deal with breathing issues.

Focusing on blood control first, instead of airways, goes against what doctors and nurses are usually taught in medical school. Doctor Ian Cassady says it takes some getting used to. The U.S. military has also adopted a new tourniquet technique for the battlefield.  Called the "hasty tourniquet." A doctor or medic who notices bleeding in a patient's arm or leg will immediately tie it off high and tight. Then, once the wound is located, they'll put a tourniquet two to four inches above it. Army officials say the technique has a 99-percent success rate of saving soldiers who are in danger of bleeding to death. Army officials say the hasty tourniquet and hemorrhage control are a few reasons we're seeing the lowest killed in action rate in U.S. military history.

The doctor who helped saved Representative Gabrielle Giffords' life after she was shot in the head in Arizona was a military surgeon. He credits his experience at combat hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan with his ability to treat Giffords and the ten other victims of that attack.