If you’ve spent most of your life as a doctor in the armed forces, it goes without saying that you know a thing or two about saving lives.
That’s certainly the case with Dr. Peter Rhee. After completing his training, Rhee was one of seven trauma surgeons in the U.S. Navy. After spending more than 25 years in the trenches, Rhee is retired from service and is using his skills at home to save lives.
As the chief of trauma and emergency surgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center (UAMC), Rhee is helping to improve survival rates and patient care.
He says that in general, a patient’s chance of surviving a gunshot wound to the brain is about 10 percent, but at his institution, it’s astonishingly higher: Around 46 percent.
“That’s because our surgeons and our neurosurgeons have worked together to be very aggressive on who we operate on…” he told ABC News. “The war that we had in Iraq shows us that when we operate more often on these people shot in the brain the survival rate is higher.”
One of his patients, former Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords is living proof of these statistics. After Giffords and 18 others were shot one Saturday morning in 2011 outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, Rhee oversaw her care, as well as treating the others wounded in the incident.
Rhee has written a new memoir, Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America’s Cities, and has appeared in a number of television news specials like Nightline, but he’s spent his career creating special programs throughout his career to educate doctors on life-threatening injuries.
After the 9/11 attacks, Rhee worked on a program to educate military doctors who have never seen a gun shot wound about the types of injuries they might encounter in war zone areas — especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rhee’s use of his military training to save lives here at home is innovative, noteworthy, and most importantly, reinventing medicine and patient care for Americans. And as more horrific, life-threatening incidents become more common in the United States, doctors are faced with more challenges to save patients. If more military doctors trained in trauma-related surgeries and life-threatening emergencies share their expertise, perhaps even more lives could be saved.
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Tag: U.S. Navy
The U.S. Navy May Have Found A Game Changer in Renewable Energy
The U.S. Navy is known to call itself “a global force for good,” and thanks to a recent renewable energy breakthrough, it may be living up to its reputation.
Last week researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Materials Science and Technology Division announced the successful flight of a small model airplane powered by a liquid hydrocarbon taken from seawater. Yes, that’s right. The ocean.
While it may just sound like a group of scientists flying a toy plane, the development could mean a future powered by one of the world’s largest infinite natural resources (here comes the oil industry hand-wringing).
The process, which extracts carbon dioxide and hydrogen from ocean water and recombines it into hydrocarbon chains, may advance efforts to refuel aircraft carriers and vessels while out at sea. The Navy currently relies on 15 oil tankers to deliver almost 600 million gallons of fuel to vessels at sea per year, according to the BBC. Though it takes an exhaustive 23,000 gallons of ocean water to create just one gallon of fuel, vessels equipped with nuclear reactors onboard can process the very water they float on to refuel, without having to wait for an oil tanker to help out.
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Researchers anticipate the new process will be ready in the next seven to 10 years, with the goal of dramatically reducing the $4 to $5 billion the military spends annually on 1.3 billion gallons of fuel. The potential green fuel would cost an estimated $3 to $6 per gallon—an expensive undertaking—but within target of the rising costs of gas. In 2012 the Navy paid about $3.60 a gallon.
Currently the Navy’s 289 vessels rely on oil-powered fuel but approximately 72 submarines and some select aircraft carriers are powered by nuclear energy. So should we expect to run our cars on saltwater anytime soon? Not so much. The Navy hopes to partner with universities for further research and plans to scale up the system onto land-based stations before shipping off a ocean-powered ship.
Regardless, the new development means that reliance on oil could be a thing of the past in the not-so-distant future and yes, some day you could be pumping the Atlantic and Pacific over regular and premium at the corner station.