Experimental traumatology

Experimental traumatology is a field of biomedical and (pre-)clinical research within the broader area of Traumatology. While traumatology is involved with "study of wounds and injuries caused by accidents or violence to a person, and the surgical therapy and repair of the damage" , experimental traumatology applies scientific methodology to experimentation within traumatology.

Experimental traumatology can be situated within different medical knowledge domains, such as within orthopedics, military medicine, psycho-traumatology, or more broadly within disaster medicine. This leads to differences in which organs and organism systems and aspects of trauma scenarios that are focused in the body of literature.

Experimental traumatology within Disaster medicine

Disaster medicine is often concerned with medical intervention in extreme situations, such as mass casualty incidents, environmental disasters, theater of war. Many such events imply difficulties in treating traumatic injuries, such as large wounds or burns, because of a lack of normal (best-practice) resources. Experimental traumatology within disaster medicine is thus motivated by finding intervention practices and materials that are simple, low-cost, and easily attainable, while also contributing to the broader field of traumatology by investigating traumatic injuries at the preclinical or basic level. The main difference between experimental traumatology and traumatology in general, or applied- or clinical traumatology, is the application of an experimental scientific methodology to investigate biological mechanisms and control for experimental variables from a biological bottom-up approach. This typically follows a preclinical workflow starting at the cellular or genetic level, and moving towards clinical translation.

Skin wounds and infectious disease are important focus areas within experimental traumatology, as are bleeding interventions and other mechanical aspects of prehospital care. Experimental traumatology is a young field, and as with disaster medicine, there are a variety of terminologies and assumptions that have changed over the past decades. The interdisciplinary nature of the field makes the scope rather broad and varied epistemological and ontological foundations are evident within the literature.

References

This article "Experimental traumatology" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Experimental traumatology. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---