I agree with you there. It is trauma oriented.
I think combat medicine is not so much a focus on trauma, but a focus on the rather narrow types of trauma seen in combat regularly, on preselected, healthy young people.
Civillian trauma in my experience is considerably more complex when you add in peds, elderly, and the rather amazing ways people manage to damage themselves in the civillian world.
Interventions like decompressing a chest or occluding a sucking chest wound, are used with great effect in military and civillian medicine alike. Starting an IV somewhat less so.
What I find really strange is that these are not EMT-Basic level skills since they can be nicely fit into "if:then" statements, and actually can save a life when called for.
Let's face it, if you wrongfully spike somebody's chest, at the hospital, the catheter is pulled and no more attention given if the pnemo created is less than 5% (a majority) If a person presents with a tension pneumo, it is one of the few conditions where immediate intervention can lead to a profoundly better prognosis.
so I can see how has no equivalent. I bet this happens with a bunch of training and colledge credits. The only way a college will recognize my training as credit hours is if I attend a State School, Community Colleges wont do it. Has this been the general situation for every branch?
Probably because you would already have amassed enough credit with your military service to confer an AS or AA degree without ever attending a class. If nothing has changed, completing bootcamp was worth 8 credit hours.
In the state university, you probably have about 2 years if not less to get a BS or BA. While not the pot of gold those degrees once were, they do position you for further success rather nicely.