Unreasonable behavior: Lessons learned on the blood tracks in rural South

Abstract

Having recognized that the trauma victim starts dying at the time of injury, the author has spent decades in war-torn communities in the rural South to build prehospital trauma systems and teach damage control surgery in an effort to save more lives. The actual narrative describes a 40 year-journey of action research and includes qualitative research on teaching models, quantitative studies of trauma system outcomes, scientific studies of hepatitis and malaria as complications to trauma, and reports of post-amputation pain syndromes managed by mirror therapy. The author concludes that to fill vital gaps of knowledge, somebody has to leave the academic bastions of claimed expertise and make what may be seen as "unreasonable" tours to communities where scientific studies has not yet been done.