Many patients taken to the University of Maryland's Shock Trauma
Center in Baltimore cling to life, barely able to breathe, much
less consent to participate in a medical trial, a reality that
makes trauma research extremely difficult. With life-saving
advances so hard to identify, researchers at Shock Trauma now
hope to get around that problem — and answer one of trauma
medicine's vexing questions — by declaring nearly everyone a
potential test subject. The Baltimore hospital is one of 12
trauma centers around the country aiming to use a controversial
bureaucratic tool to bypass individual consent and conduct the
type of large-scale medical experiment that has proved elusive
in the messy, life-and-death specialty of trauma care. When the
trial is finished sometime in 2015, researchers hope to finally
answer the question of how best to transfuse blood products into
a patient who is bleeding to death. Until that answer surfaces,
every accident victim, gunshot victim or other severely bleeding
patient in the Bal