Medical Device Daily Executive Editor

On this day, of all anniversary days, it seems especially important to look at the synergy between hatred and healing, killing and curing.

Death has always been a boon to medical science. Dying provides a window into the continual entropy and injury of cells and organs. And what would the surgeon do without the cadaver?

The ironic fact is that premeditated killing - not really premeditated murder, since war is rationalized as defense, or as an ethically supported form of premeditation - has always energized and speeded new medical discoveries.

The American Civil War used the new railroad systems to help fuel the wide dissemination of diseases, with gunfire and explosives vastly multiplying amputation. These events pushed the obvious needs for antiseptics and anesthesia.

Every modern war has accelerated the development of emergency services - in particular, the faster administration of stabilizing medical care within the "golden hour" to aid in saving soldiers' lives, and improving the chances for recovery and rehabilitation as soon as possible.

All wars have underlined and produced the need for better prosthetics, and Medical Device Daily has recently written about some of these - arms, fingers, knees that employ advanced materials and computerized robotics that aid in helping them to look and act much more like "original equipment" (MDD, Oct. 7, 2006/Aug. 16/Aug. 30/Sept. 7, 2007).

I even consider myself a living beneficiary of medical developments first widely employed in a time of war.

From age 2 to 6 or so, I often couldn't stand straight up and had strange swellings on my back. The doctors tested me for everything but found nothing (though it was probably a simmering underlying infection brought home from the hospital labor and delivery rooms).

After all else failed, my dad - a U.S. Army chaplain during World War II, and just returned from Europe - mentioned to my doctors this new "wonder" drug he had seen used to good effect with G.I.s: sulfa.

Voila! The result was that I soon became a crawling-to-walking, class-clowning and, from then on, a quite healthy, frequently scribbling member of society.

Today, for soldiers, the trauma from roadside bombs and other explosives is being called the "signature" wound as a result of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Besides focusing the attention of military physicians treating "war fighters," this type of injury more and more is interfacing with concerns about civilian injuries: repeated concussions in big-time American football and the hidden social/psychological damage from head traumas among professional wrestlers. (And why do baseball and football players insist on hitting their mates on the head after making a big play? Have they heard of detached retinas?)

Last month, two organizations, Force Protection (Ladson, South Carolina) and the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC; Charleston) issued a press statement reporting an agreement to push forward high-tech brain scanning, and development of the Force Protection Center for Brain Research at MUSC, in order to better understand the long-term neurological consequences of injuries from blast.

As of now, this "agreement" is much like "love" - more verbiage than action. A spokesperson for Force Protection told MDD that what it amounts to, so far, is the understanding that the company will "assist" in finding the money to purchase a $4 million scanner solely dedicated by MUSC to brain research, first going to the government to seek such funds.

That's a whole lot of money, but perhaps Force Protection has an "in" for such efforts, since it manufactures the Buffalo and Cougar ballistic- and blast-protected vehicles used in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq to protect troops from roadside bombs and other explosives.

If the agreement develops into dollars and the purchase of the scanner, the benefit for the university will be to increase its already strong footprint in this research area; and for Force Protection, the benefit will be the use of that research to improve the design of its vehicles - and thus save lives.

The point is that weaponry, high- or low-tech, pushes forward high-tech medicine, and these benefits are then most broadly seen in civilian healthcare. But more and more, this pattern needs to work the other way around as well.

It is common practice for op-ed writers these days to chastise us civilians - and by extension, our governments - for not making (or not having to make) any real sacrifices for the current ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. We are continually being told that we haven't had to make any cut-backs economically or any real changes in our everyday behaviors (other than slowed airline boarding) in order to support our troops overseas.

While I think this is not entirely true (I would point to the social and personal schisms among us, created by the inability of the political parties to find reasonable compromises), the vast majority of us do sail on unperturbed in our buying and enjoying.

In such an environment, healthcare services can do more than make sacrifices. They can offer huge contributions serving to recognize and memorialize the fallen, and aid both civilian and military victims of war. They should do everything possible to encourage the best use of the best healthcare technologies in wartime and press their governments to expend every effort to see this happen.

If we cannot make sacrifices, we can certainly seek to reduce the suffering of war as a way of using the lessons of those who died on 9/11 and in other conflicts before and since, to seek reduced numbers of deaths and debilitating injuries and to push forward medical care for those who will suffer, inevitably, in the wars to come.