Time: Amputations performed without doctors at Abu Ghraib

[kalen]

When can we expect someone (not a grunt) to be held accountable?

Tethers were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor, and there were risible medical facilities for the detainees with non-doctors performing amputations and chest tubes being recycled from the dead to the living, Time magazine reports.

By one account, a medic was ordered once to cover up a homicide. "That in itself would have made Abu Ghraib a scandal even without the acts of torture inflicted on the inmates by their guards," Time notes.

http://headlines.sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13664354

 

[kimiko]

...non-doctors performing amputations and chest tubes being recycled from the dead to the living

I am horrified if it is true that they were having some other sort of personnel lopping off limbs. There is no reason anything other than a board certified surgeon should have performed those.

This is particularly disturbing to me as I have narrowly escaped having an amputation more than once. To imagine someone untrained doing that turns my stomach.

 

[Ipecac]

Re: Re: Time: Amputations performed without doctors at Abu Ghraib

This is particularly disturbing to me as I have narrowly escaped having an amputation more than once.

I think this certainly requires some explanation.

 

[Rob Lister]

Re: Re: Re: Time: Amputations performed without doctors at Abu Ghraib

I think this certainly requires some explanation.

I agree. Let's start with the actual Time article rather than a biased summary of it.

Think about it. Under what circumstances would a "non-doctor" perform an amputation? Reuse chest-tubes from dead people? Etc.

 

[Luke T.]

What will be the next story about Abu Ghraib? Satanic baby sacrifice rituals? Alien autopsies? An Elvis sighting?

Stay tuned!

 

[Silicon]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Time: Amputations performed without doctors at Abu Ghraib

Time:

But there was also medical disarray at the prison: amputations performed by nondoctors, chest tubes recycled from the dead to the living, a medic ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide. That in itself would have made Abu Ghraib a scandal even without the acts of torture inflicted on the inmates by their guards.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1025139,00.html

 

[Grammatron]

The devil is in the details

The medical understaffing and under-stocking of Abu Ghraib were felt most acutely after the prison came under shelling by insurgents. A doctor who served there recalled an attack last April when a mortar landed on an outdoor pen holding prisoners, killing at least 16 outright and wounding more than 60. Former prison personnel described how those attacks produced pandemonium, with panicked prisoners seeking treatment from what were at times very few, poorly equipped medical workers. "When somebody died, we just took out their chest tube and inserted it into another, living person," said National Guard Captain Kelly Parrson, a physician's assistant at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and 2004 who experienced three such attacks and was seriously injured by a mortar. "There was no other choice because we did not have enough."

That's from the same Time article.

 

[Cleon]

This is obviously just a harmless frat prank.

 

[Silicon]

The devil is in the details

And the REASON they were understaffed and understocked is what exactly?

Going to war with the Army you have, rather than the Army that ... something or other?

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

If they prisoners wanted better medical care, perhaps they should get health insurance.

 

[WildCat]

And the REASON they were understaffed and understocked is what exactly?

Going to war with the Army you have, rather than the Army that ... something or other?

It is just common sense to staff avery prison w/ hundreds of doctors in case of a mortar attack. Prisons are valuable military targets, after all.

 

[Art Vandelay]

Silicon

And the REASON they were understaffed and understocked is what exactly?

Going to war with the Army you have, rather than the Army that ... something or other?

If the point is to make accusations of poor preparation, then why not make them to begin with, rather than imply something else, then switch when it is shown to be not justified? Seems like bait and switch to me.

 

[Nova Land]

A few more excerpts from the Time article:

... some military doctors at Abu Ghraib [were] enlisted to help inflict distress on the prisoners...

... Medical personnel and others who worked at the prison tell TIME that, with straitjackets unavailable, tethers ... were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees... uch a restraint -- which is supposed to be placed around legs, arms or torsos -- ended up instead around a man's neck...

... Although the prison was at times crowded with as many as 7,000 detainees, no U.S. doctor was in residence for most of 2003. Military officials say a few Iraqi doctors saw to minor illnesses but not major traumas... [A]n Army medic ... spoke of examining from 800 to 900 detainees daily as they were admitted. If he worked a 12-hour day, that gave him less than a minute for each exam...

... Items had to be reused with minimal sterilization or done without ...

... [A prisoner] expired under questioning in the middle of the night in an episode that has been officially ruled a homicide... [M]ilitary personnel ordered the body put on ice and then spirited it away after medics attached a fake IV to the dead man's arm in an apparent attempt to create the impression that he was still alive...

One of the charges made against the North Vietnamese, in relation to their treatment of US POWs during the Vietnam War, is that they often refused to provide medical care to seriously wounded prisoners. In researching the treatment of US POWs recently in regard to another thread, what I found might be worth considering in relation to what seems to be happening here.

Some of the complaints of US prisoners being denied medical care turned out, on close reading, to actually be that they were denied the care which they wanted to receive (and would have received if they were back home in the USA) but which the North Vietnamese camps were not equipped to provide. In many of the cases, the POWs refused the treatment they were offered because it would have been amputations by less-than-ideally-skilled personnel using less-than-ideally-sterilized equipment. Thus many US prisoners preferred to gamble on leaving serious wounds untreated rather than risk getting the kind of treatment being practiced at Abu Ghraib.

I think the North Vietnamese (and their counterparts in the South, the Viet Cong) can make a slightly better case for the inadequacy of the medical care they were able to offer to POWs in their camps than the US can today in Iraq. They were a poor nation whose resources had been drained by a lengthy war against a series of powerful enemies. In contrast, we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world, with a multi-hundred-billion-dollar military budget, and we are fighting a war which we were able to plan in advance and choose the timing of against a fairly weak opponent.

So does the justification that some seem to be offering here -- that it's okay to have non-doctors performing amputations, it's okay to tie straps around a guy's neck in order to restrain him, it's okay to take chest tubes out of someone who has just died and re-use the tubes in someone else, so long as you honestly don't have enough qualified medical people and necessary medical supplies at hand to do the job properly -- truly excuse such actions? (And does that also make it okay to falsify reports in order to cover up death-during-interrogation?)

Those who wish to offer such an excuse on behalf of the USA are welcome to offer that same excuse on behalf of the North Vietnamese. I don't buy it as an excuse for what the North Vietnamese did 40 years ago, and I don't buy it as an excuse for the USA in the present.

 

[Silicon]

Silicon
If the point is to make accusations of poor preparation, then why not make them to begin with, rather than imply something else, then switch when it is shown to be not justified? Seems like bait and switch to me.

Nova Land has made better points than I have.

Preparation and execution, both poor and inexcusable.


Inexcusable, except by people who argue on the internet.

 

[Renfield]

The devil is in the details



That's from the same Time article.

True. In a combat situation conditions are going to be less then ideal. Something like an emergency amputation might have been unavoidable. They sound like they were actually doing the best they could under the conditions.