Orthopedic injuries, says the U.S. National Library of Medicine, are among the most likely conditions to be overlooked in hospital emergency rooms nationwide.
Maybe that’s why Indian River Medical Center just added Dr. William Stanton to its ER team.
Stanton, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, began his career as a combat engineer before going on to medical school at the University of Miami and serving his internship at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Upon returning to active duty, Stanton served multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as an orthopedic trauma surgeon. Prior to joining the team at IRMC, he spent 13 years on the staff at Lawnwood Regional Medical Center, the nearest officially designated trauma center to Vero Beach.
Significant orthopedic injuries, including those with multiple broken bones, compound fractures – in which the bone protrudes outside the skin – as well as breaks at or near joints and fractures of the pelvis, can be life-threatening. They require immediate care. The American Red Cross specifically points to “breaks in large bones such as the thigh or pelvis and those which may sever an artery or affect breathing” as being especially dangerous.
Nonetheless, the National Institutes of Health states, “there is a tendency among some emergency room physicians not to think about looking for other injuries after finding an initial one,” but the youthful-looking 53-year-old Stanton graciously provides his fellow ER physicians with something of a pass for missing certain types of orthopedic injuries.
“Let’s say you’ve had a bad accident,” Stanton explains, “and you have an open abdomen … but you also have a broken ankle or a fractured finger.” In those situations, Stanton says, the ankle or the finger is just not that high on the doctors’ priority list.
“Later, when the patient is awake and you have nothing that is life- or limb-threatening, it’s a lot less likely the doctors are going to miss a broken hand, broken toe or something.”
Doctors here in Indian River County also have a massive diagnostic edge over Army physicians in combat zones.
Depending on where a combat orthopedic trauma surgeon like Stanton is deployed, the imaging equipment needed to detect fractures inside the body may be less than ideal.
“We had these little portable X-ray machines,” Stanton recalls, “that were not very good. You really couldn’t rely a lot on those X-rays. The further you get back away from the front line, the better the facilities [and imaging equipment] are.”
On those front lines, Stanton says, the mission is to stabilize the patient for transport. “That’s what that you have to do. You really don’t need an MRI all the way forward because you’re not going to get to that level of evaluation” on the front lines of any battle.
Fortunately, here on the Treasure Coast, ER doctors don’t have to contend with combat conditions or the effects of the “improvised explosive devices” or IEDs that have become a weapon of choice for some combatants in the Middle East and Asia, causing devastating injuries. However, automobile accidents, falls and degenerative bone diseases such as osteoarthritis pose their own special orthopedic problems here.
As Stanton puts it, “On I-95, where people are going 75 miles an hour in a one-and-a-half-ton vehicle and then get hit by an 18-wheeler, which is X number of tons, there’s just a lot of energy involved. That’s where you’re going to get the worst injuries.”
After 13 years at Lawnwood’s trauma center, Stanton has seen his fair share of those situations.
He has also seen some radical improvements in the treatment of severe orthopedic injuries. The heavy braces, casts and splints of the not-too-distant past have given way – in many cases – to modern bone reconstruction and even “minimally invasive” techniques to stabilize and treat dangerous fractures and breaks.
“Minimally invasive techniques are present for all sorts of orthopedic procedures,” including stabilizing fractured femurs or thigh bones, Stanton says
Combat-tested, with more than a dozen years of local trauma center experience, Stanton’s addition to the IRMC team might just make it a little less likely that serious orthopedic injuries will be overlooked in this emergency room – despite what the U.S. National Library of Medicine says.
Dr. Stanton’s office is in the new IRMC Health and Wellness building at 3450 11th Court, Suite 302. The phone number is 772-794-1444.