720 pages. Twenty years have passed since the forerunner of this book, the last edition of The U.

S. Army Special Forces Medical Handbook, was published.

The world has changed dramatically in those twenty years, with new weapons, threats and diseases emerging. Advancing technology and an explosive proliferation of medical information on the Internet have revolutionized medical practice.

However, the mission of the Special Operations Forces (SOF) medic has not changed: unaided, the medic provides care with limited resources in austere, hostile, stressful, and isolated environments, without the capability to evacuate the patient for up to seventy-two hours. The scope and standards of the SOF medical mission are radically different from those found in a fixed-facility, fully equipped and staffed hospital in a peaceful setting in the United States.

Few in the civilian (or even military) medical profession ever are challenged with the conditions in which SOF medics practice medicine daily. The SOF medic still has the ultimate medical mission.

Despite the proliferation of medical information, no single reference source has emerged addressing the varied and complicated needs of the SOF medic. As a result, conflicting information and even misinformation have created confusion over the most basic medical questions, possibly endangering the lives of those we are committed to helping.

The SOF medical community had to remedy this dangerous situation by creating a new SOF Medical Handbook, one that provides guidance to medics in our special environment, answering the hard diagnostic and treatment questions as best as possible. These answers are based on the best possible knowledge and tailored to the austere mission - in plain, straightforward language, without excuses, conditions or academic musings.

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