Luncheon Discussion on Advances in Military Medicine (Houston)

Please join BENS members and guests for a luncheon discussion on how the lessons of a small group of world class trauma experts who joined forces with America’s best combat medics to rewrite the rule book on how battlefield medicine can save lives and impact trauma throughout the United States. At the start of the first Gulf War, there had been very little progress in battlefield trauma care since the Civil War. The concepts embodied in Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) changed that landscape.

Dr. Frank K. Butler Jr., founder of the US military’s TCCC program, will discuss how the changes in battlefield trauma care they instituted have reduced the incidence of preventable deaths among combat casualties to the lowest level in history, and how TCCC has been credited with saving the lives of thousands of our nation’s wounded service members in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaker Background: Captain Frank K. Butler, Jr., MD, USN (Ret.), is the author of Tell Them Yourself: It’s Not Your Day to Die and founder of the US military’s TCCC program, which he led for 25 years. On January 2, 2025, Dr. Butler was awarded the prestigious Presidential Citizens Medal in a ceremony at the White House by President Joe Biden recognizing his extraordinary contributions to battlefield trauma care and his enduring impact on both military and civilian medicine.

After successfully completing the Navy’s rigorous SEAL training course, he served as a platoon commander in Underwater Demolition Team Twelve and SEAL Team One. Dr. Butler then went on to earn his medical degree and completed training at the Navy Undersea Medical Institute. He was also assigned as a diving medical research officer at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, where his research efforts led to significant advances in most of the diving techniques used by Navy SEALs.

Dr. Butler was named the Director of the Navy SEAL Biomedical Research Program in 1990. He deployed as the Task Force Surgeon for a joint Special Operations task force in Afghanistan in 2003 and was shortly thereafter selected to be the first Navy physician to serve as the Command Surgeon for the U.S. Special Operations Command. Dr. Butler was subsequently selected to be the Chair of the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care, a position he served in for 11 years.