The U.S. Army has quietly altered or abandoned some of its more experimental medical treatments for troops injured in combat, as advances it once hailed as groundbreaking are foundlargely ineffective or perhaps even dangerous.
Advanced battle dressings, a blood-clotting drug, alternative procedures for emergency blood transfusions - each was introduced early in the Iraq war, often with little evidence to support them beyond anecdotes or tests on animals. A few were adopted widely by civilian hospitals, based almost exclusively on accolades from the military.
But an investigation by The Baltimore Sun reveals that military doctors and medics, and in some cases uniformed leaders, have rejected or curtailed use of many of the new devices and techniques as clinical experience and data from the war zone yield disappointing and sometimes troubling results.
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