Doctors plan gun violence rally
Angry and frustrated, health care professionals across the country organize to bring attention to public health crisis
STANFORD >> Although they stood just yards away, even the best and brightest trauma experts at Stanford Hospital were no match for a small single bullet.
Inside the doors of the hospital’s Emergency Department on a routine day this summer, the award-winning team of surgeons, emergency physicians, anesthesiologists, nurses and technicians scurried about, helping fix and heal.
Just outside, sitting in a chair and unnoticed, was a man with a gun. He put it to his head and fired — one of nearly 100 gun-related deaths in the U.S. that day — and died instantly.
“Terrible,” said Dr. David Spain, chief of trauma at Stanford Health Care. “Senseless. Just senseless.”
On Monday, angry and frustrated by gun violence, health care professionals at Stanford Medical Center and 40 other leading medical centers will hold simultaneous rallies to treat firearm violence as a public health crisis.
It’s a non-partisan action cofounded by Stanford’s Professor of Medicine Dr. Dean Winslow and fourth year medical student Sarabeth Spitzer. Winslow, a registered Republican, is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and flight surgeon deployed six times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrat Sarabeth Spitzer, 26, is a magna cum laude Harvard graduate who dreams of becoming a trauma surgeon.
At noon on the Dean’s Lawn, next to the Clark Center on the
Stanford campus, leaders wearing light blue attire with the SAFE (Scrubs Addressing the Firearms Epidemic) logo will speak about the health risks posed by guns, then hold a teach-in about gun epidemiology, trauma care and related topics. The public is invited.
When viruses, bacteria and cancers kill thousands of people, there are outraged demands for a cure, they say.
“If this were any other public health problem, we wouldn’t stand for it,” said Spain, who once had to tell four mothers, in a single night, that their sons were dead. “But it’s such a hot button political topic that we lose the ability to talk about it.”
In recent years, an increasing number of medical groups — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and American Medical Association — have begun speaking up about the role of gun safety. But they’ve typically worked in silos — and haven’t united to speak with a central voice, said Spitzer and Spain.
“We’ve been a little slow,” said Spain. “We’re politically adverse. Our mission is education and research. This is advocacy.”
But they despair at the lack of funding for research into gun violence at the federal Centers For Disease Control, which ended after Congress passed the Dickey Amendment in 1996.
As a result, there are no answers to standard epidemiological questions, such as: Who’s at highest risk of gun injury? Where do guns come from? Are the people arrested for gun crimes the owners, or are weapons stolen? Are there ways to make guns safer? How do we better protect the depressed and mentally ill?
The group is partnering with AFFIRM, an organization that specializes in privately funding firearm injury prevention research, bypassing political obstacles and inaction.
Medical and nursing schools offer plenty of guidance about how to talk to patients about diet, exercise, GUN VIOLENCE
Gun violence in the United States in one year, on average* Every year, about 124,760 people are shot.
That’s 342 a day. About 89,620 of them survive.
35,141 people die.
That’s 96 people a day. Among those who die, about two-thirds are by suicide. Nearly 2,800 children and teens die from gunshots.
* Based on most recent five years of complete data from death certificates (2011-2015) and estimates of emergency room admissions (2010-2014.) Source: Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, via CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention
seat belts, helmets, sex, smoking, alcohol use and other risk factors, but nothing about safely navigating firearms, Spitzer says.
“But there’s nothing in the curriculum about firearms,” said Spitzer. “How can we answer patients’ questions? This is critical for physicians to be able to reduce the injuries from firearms.”
If doctors taught a class about a gunshot, this is what they’d say:
Bullets often tumble once they enter the body; they don’t go through in a straight line, like in the movies. And if the tip of the bullet explodes, “it rips everything up. It’s pretty devastating,” said Spain.
If there’s only one hole, “we don’t know if the bullet is up, down or sideways,” said Spain. “Do I go into the chest, or the abdomen? We’re wrong 50 percent of the time. So we take our best guess and go from there.”
To save a life, doctors face enormous odds. First, they try to stop bleeding, patching holes in blood vessels; if it’s too bad, they quickly insert tubes for blood to flow. Then they try to stop bacterial contamination, especially if there are holes in the gastrointestinal tract. Patients may die when blood loss leads to shock and heart failure, or contamination causes sepsis. With the body cavity open, patients also get dangerously cold.
And: semi-automatic weapons have no role in contemporary civilian life. For Winslow, the wounds conjure up painful memories of when, working in a front line hospital in a war zone, he was called to the morgue to pronounce death on casualties — coalition soldiers or American civilians — brought in from the field. He looked for dog tags, examined the remains and signed preliminary death certificates. He recalled the surgeon’s note that accompanied the body of a young U.S. Army captain, shot in the neck: “It was an honor to care for this brave American soldier. May God rest his soul.”
Two days after the mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Nov. 5, 2017, Winslow opined that it was “insane … that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semiautomatic weapon like an AR-15.” Nominated by President Trump for the post of assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Winslow fell out of contention.
They’d also explain that survival might mean a lifetime of paralysis, perhaps around-the-clock care by family members.
And with death, it’s forever, said Spain.
“We’ve been reluctant to jump into this,” he said. “But we can’t stay out any longer.”
For more information or to attend Monday’s event go to www. standsafe.org. Stanford’s SAFE rally will be held at noon on the Dean’s Lawn, next to the Clark Center, followed by an educational event at 12:30 p.m. at the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge. Speakers include Winslow; John Donahue, professor of law; and David Spain, professor of surgery.