A gunshot victim who became a doctor's attack on US military violence

BALTIMORE, Maryland: At the age of 17, Joseph Sakran was shot in the throat after a high school football match – a life-threatening injury that led to his becoming a doctor.

Sakran said that gun violence in the United States is a health crisis that health professionals can and should help fix.

He has become the public face of a campaign to unite doctors, nurses and others who treat victims of gun violence with the goal of reducing it, thereby countering the badertion of the lobby of the National Rifle Association ( NRA) that the problem does not concern him.

"When you look at gun violence (…), there is no doubt that the public health crisis we are facing is a public health crisis," Sakran told the hospital. Johns Hopkins of Baltimore, where he is director of General Surgery Emergency.

The 41-year-old doctor said that gun deaths should be addressed as other major health threats, such as smoking and obesity.

"This is part of the prevention of injuries that we, clinicians and scientists, see as part of our responsibility," he said.

For Sakran, who said he had discussed with "hundreds, if not thousands" of firearms owners, saying that "in fact, we have much more in common than what divides us", the problem is not the ban on firearms.

"In the '60s and' 70s, when people were dying as a result of a car accident, we did not get rid of cars, and we understood:" How can we make cars safer? "

"THIS IS OUR LANE"

As a survivor of a gunshot wound and treated, Sakran was "a little angry" when the NRA wanted to involve doctors in the gun violence debate.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns have killed nearly 40,000 people in the United States in 2017. And despite the scale of the problem, efforts to address it in a legislative way have long been stalled at the federal level.

"Someone should tell the anti-gun doctors who are so important to stay in their hallway," tweeted the NRA in November, inviting a medical journal to publish what seemed to him to be too many articles supporting gun control.

"I think the medical community – not just the non-gun owners but also the gun owners – said the medical group had stated that we were not part of the solution, "said Sakran.

He opened the account @ThisIsOurLane on Twitter, which currently has more than 28,000 subscribers.

Sakran is one of the leaders of the campaign of the same name and said on social media, on paper and on television that health professionals are actually "in their hall" when discussing armed violence.

This Is Our Lane has several purposes: to communicate about gun violence, to conduct research, to educate health professionals on how to discuss issues such as the safe storage of firearms, and to pressure for a "common sense law to be adopted", he said.

And while this has emerged as a response to the NRA's message, This Is Our Lane is finally "not about us against them," Sakran said.

"It's really about … working together to engage Americans and make communities safer."

"ON THE FRONT LINE"

Sakran's journey to becoming a doctor began in 1994, while he was spending time with friends after the first football game of the high school season in Burke, Virginia.

A fight broke out and Sakran saw a lightning bolt while someone opened fire, striking him on the neck and another person at the shoulder.

"I quickly realized that I had to be touched because I had a lot of blood on me," he said.

He went to the edge of the street and sat down, but he was soaked with so much blood that it was difficult to determine where he had been shot.

When his friends tried to bed him, he began to choke.

Sakran was taken to a hospital in the area where a vein was removed from his leg to repair his carotid artery.

He was hospitalized for several weeks, had to undergo many operations and still has neck scars caused by the operation that saved him.

"This moment really inspired me, prompted me to go to medicine, it inspired me to become a trauma surgeon," Sakran said.

He eventually returned to the same hospital as an emergency room technician, then as a medical student and resident in surgery, training with the same people who saved his life. .

For Sakran, health professionals have a unique perspective on armed violence to care for and care for their victims and their families, a perspective they can incorporate into the discussion.

"We are at the forefront of caring for wounded patients and being transferred to our trauma centers," he said. "We see them in their most vulnerable and difficult moments."