Frontline Medicine. Part 1, Survival.

The first in a two part series in which Michael Mosley looks at the latest cutting edge medical treatments for soldiers wounded during battle. Mosley travels to Camp Bastion in Afghanistan where they are managing to keep wounded soldiers alive that would undoubtedly have died ten years ago. The hospital there deals with some of the most severe injuries in the world with the most common cause of death being massive blood loss. The military team have discovered that if they give blood with an equal amount of plasma it helps the blood to clot and prevents the patient from continuing to bleed. We see 20-year-old Lance Corporal Ronald Jones, a double amputee and follow the team as they diagnose his wounds and perform life-saving surgery on him. Mosley hears how a powerful portable tourniquet is helping to stem blood loss and save lives on the frontline and we see a training session in how to use it. Another soldier describes how he used his new medical skills to save a fellow soldier. We see inside a MERT, Medical Emergency Response Team, and a female medic, Charlie, runs through the emergency procedure that would be used on a double amputee. Chuck, a US Marine, is brought in with a severely damaged foot and medics describe how they no longer use morphine for pain but local anaesthetic as continuous nerve block to the specific area. This is being taken up too by the NHS. Mosley looks into new research which is showing how effective progesterone can be in minimising the damage caused by head injuries and how extreme cold, induced hypothermia can be used to buy time for people following traumatic life-threatening injuries. Finally, Mosley visits CJ, a traumatic amputeeundergoing rehabilitation, and he talks extremely movingly about how the event has affected him: "the pain that's in my mind is so much worse than that pain that's in my body."