Page 8 - JSOM Spring 2020

In addition to presenting new information on battle-
field trauma care in the journal that is most likely to
reach the primary providers of TCCC (combat med-
ics, corpsmen, and pararescuemen), the TCCC/JSOM
partnership ensures that each change paper will be-
come a permanent part of the indexed and search-
able medical literature, because the Journal of Special
Operations Medicine is included in the Index Medi-
cus. These 16 TCCC change papers published in the
JSOM, and those that will follow, constitute an invalu-
able resource for battlefield trauma care innovators in Also in 2013, I was approached by then LTC Bob Mabry, now
the future because they will provide the historical con- COL (Ret) Mabry, in regards to having the JSOM become the
text for current TCCC recommendations. That under- Official Journal of SOMA.
standing will assist these individuals in understanding
how best to evaluate and respond to new evidence COL Mabry recalls,
and experience as it becomes available.
When I served as the president of the Special Oper-
ations Medical Association (SOMA), my goal was to
take the organization from simply holding a great an-
nual meeting to being a professional medical society. I
felt SOMA had tremendous untapped potential to ad-
vance Special Operations Medicine even further. The
elements were already there . . . we have a unique field
of medicine like no other, we had difficult battlefield
problems to solve, we had dedicated members, we
had a venue for getting folks together with SOMSA,
and we had folks from industry and academia who
wanted to help our members solve those problems.
We just did not have a vehicle other than SOMSA to
communicate advances in “our specialty” like other
For all of these reasons, the JSOM was recently pre- medical societies.
sented with a TCCC Special Award to acknowledge As one of the few emergency medical services
its singular contribution to the TCCC effort and to im- board-certified physicians in the Department of De-
proving the care of our country’s combat wounded. fense, I was familiar with the National Association
Thank you, Michelle Landers and Team! of EMS Physicians, or NAEMSP. I saw many parallels
—CAPT (Ret) Frank Butler, MD with their organization and SOMA. I felt NAEMSP was
a great model for SOMA. They, too, had a unique
niche of medicine focused on out-of-hospital care.
They, too, had a great annual meeting with dedicated
members and volunteers committed to improving pa-
tient care out of the hospital. Their membership was
roughly the same size as ours, but where they differed
was that they also had a quality journal . . . Prehospital
Emergency Care.
Because the JSOM was ingrained in the SOMA com-
munity since its beginning as a SOCOM-SG publica-
tion, we decided to make it official and partner with
the JSOM as our ‘official journal’ of SOMA. This part-
nership allowed us to advance our unique specialty of
medicine and to be able to offer the JSOM as a bene-
fit to our members like the other professional medical
societies.

We have had a long-term Shared Science partnership with the
Wilderness Medical Society. We are pleased to announce a new
partnership with them; WMS is now offering JSOM subscribers
a 20% discount on WMS memberships. Sign into your JSOM
account and scroll to the WMS section of the home page for
the discount code.

4 | JSOM Volume 20, Edition 1 / Spring 2020