As two officers shot in East Boston last week continue to recover, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans has been speaking openly about the lifesaving treatment they received at Mass. General Hospital from Dr. King and his team.
If that name sounds familiar, it's because Dr. David King was also among the surgeons who helped survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He had just finished the race himself when he jumped into action.
King served as Lieutenant Colonel and combat surgeon in the US Army while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he learned valuable lessons that translated to the emergency room at MGH when he began there in 2008.
"There is no question that our patients now are benefiting from lessons learned in the past decade of war,” King said in 2013.
One of those lessons was the impact a tourniquet can have on a life-saving situation.
King re-introduced the battlefield treatment technique through a program that trains teachers, school nurses, and recently a group of Boston police officers.
Those techniques were used to help the officers shot in East Boston before they were brought to MGH.
“The officer who actually applied it, just came off of training just this past Thursday/so you talk about a coincidence really paying off for us,” Evans said last week.
Since this story aired, several people who have been treated by Dr. King's team have reached out to WFXT, including one man who said his heart needed to be manually restarted twice during surgery after being shot several times at point blank range.
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