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US military to stop shooting live animals to train medics for the battlefield
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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I mean ER doctors and surgeons get patients with the same wounds and as far as I know don’t shoot live animals in med school.
ER doctors and surgeons have the privilege of being able to watch live surgeries during training, and doing their first live surgeries with safe supervision. The first time a field medic is trying to save a life in a live situation, it's rather likely that they don't have any supervisor on hand, and that someone is actively trying to kill them.
Why wouldn't a future field medic be able to do time in emergency rooms where they are almost certain to see a variety of injuries that would compare to many types of battlefield injuries?
Oh, that would absolutely be great!
However, it's worth noting that the common field medic is a far less qualified surgeon/doctor than the typical doctor in training that's doing surgery at an ER under supervision. A field medics job is to pack wounds, apply chest seals, and do other critical life-saving work, while possibly under fire, so that the wounded survive until they get to a place where actual ER doctors can treat them.
As such, you need to give them some form of live training at doing those things, without requiring the resources it would take to train them to a point where it's responsible to let them work on civilians at an ER under supervision. Basically, field medics work in the interim where you definitely need them in the field (significantly more qualified at saving lives than the common soldier), while you very likely don't want them working on civilians in an ER (significantly less qualified than actual trauma surgeons).
But they can still observe, and you can put them on a messy dummy in a stressful environment and have them apply a tourniquet and seal a sucking chest wound. You can also do that on a live, writhing non-injured person (but don't actually apply the tq to them please).
Paramedics and EMTs see things in the setting in happened in. Same lack of shock training before doing it live.
It's about psychology under fire. The doctors that treat gunshot wounds in a safe, secure ER don't have to be trained to do so in life threatening situations when the patient can't be moved to a secure location.
EMTs -do- sometimes experience this, and as someone who knows a former EMT, the experience is psychologically devistating when you're there on-scene watching someone die.
I would never advocate for causing harm or distress in the name of training. That said, if you needed to desensitize an 18yo wannabe doctor, sticking him in a field with a bunch of pigs, where a drill instructor shoots one right next to them and they have to stabilize the wound right away... Yeah, that's probably really good training for that specific role...