Hand injuries come in all flavors. Knives, motor blocks, sheet metal, augers, lawn mowers and – gunshot injuries. The latter is something I started to see only once I moved to the US.
Logically, the phenomenon plagued hand surgeons most during times of armed conflicts. World War II, the Korean and Vietnam war and recently the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan influenced the way hand surgeons think about these types of injury.
Some say the principles of treatment are forgotten soon after each armed conflict and have to be rediscovered during the next. My personal journey into this phenomenon was profoundly influenced by the writings from the Vietnam era, which I found easy to transpose into a civilian’s world while obtaining functional results reliably.
The following lecture was given as one of my visiting scholar’s lectures at 6th People’s Hospital in Shanghai in 2008 (leaving out most of the gruesome intraoperative photographs):
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