Courses Don’t Make Experts, Practice Does
There is a quiet but persistent myth in modern professional life: attend a course, receive a certificate, and emerge somehow transformed into a competent practitioner. … Read more
What Future Conflict Will Really Look Like
We tend to imagine the next war using the language of the last one. Frontlines. Forward operating bases. Evacuation corridors. Protected rear areas. Helicopters lifting … Read more
Expertise Is Earned With Your Hands
There is a particular confidence that comes from having done the thing yourself. Not read about it. Not watched someone else do it. Not quoted a … Read more
The Resource We Keep Forgetting
There is a great deal of conversation at the moment about prolonged field care, about evacuation denial, about scarce skill sets, high-value clinicians, and the … Read more
Why the Four-Person Expeditionary Surgical Team Is No Longer Optional
For decades, military medicine has been built around a comforting assumption: that there will always be a place behind the fight where casualties can be … Read more
Vomiting Blood: When the Gut Bleeds Loudly
There are few sights in medicine that still silence a room. A patient vomiting blood is one of them. Bright red or coffee-ground, slow or … Read more
Change in Bowel Habit and Rectal Bleeding: When the Gut Changes Its Mind
Few symptoms unsettle patients more than a change in bowel habit or the sight of blood where none should be. Stools, after all, are deeply … Read more
Abdominal Swelling: When the Abdomen Is Trying to Explain Itself
Abdominal swelling is one of those presentations that looks deceptively simple. The patient points to their abdomen and says, “Doctor, it’s getting bigger.” What they … Read more
Every Curve Ball Is Still a Ball: Lessons From the Trauma Table
In trauma, unpredictability is not an anomaly, it is the environment. You can be as prepared as any human being possibly can be: your drills … Read more
Never Become the Monday Morning Quarterback
There is a particular kind of behaviour that appears after every conflict, every kinetic deployment, every traumatic event where clinicians and medics have intervened under … Read more