How long does it usually take for such a wound to heal? I'm not an expert but I don't think Moftiss would miss such a thing.

Last edited by Mary Me (July 29, 2013 6:46 pm)

So he would have either not come directly home from Afghanistan or they overlooked that detail. Interesting how detailed the medical consequences of the wound are treated in many fanfics while in the series they concentrate on the psychosomatic problems with the leg. There is also the question if the tremor in his hand was just PTSD-induced or also connected with the shoulder injury. 

Depends on where you are shot.  If you are shot in the joint, the damage to the bones, ligaments, blood vessels, etc. can be pretty extensive and require multiple surgeries, rehab and probably mean that the joint would never be 100% again.  If you are shot in the torso next to the joint, it could hit ribs, the clavicle, the scapula or worse...the arteries and veins running through that area.  If the subclavian artery is hit, someone would bleed out very quickly, so you don't want to get hit there.  Of course, if the bullet hits bone, it can ricochet or splinter apart, causing all sorts of damage.

It is a nod to canon.

I agree.

As for the seriousness of his shoulder injury, don't forget that John told Sherlock that he didn't have to imagine what his last words would be if he'd been murdered and was facing his last few seconds of life.  It's clear that he had lived it.  Also, his shoulder injury and its aftermath was serious enough to get him invalided from the army.  So it was by no means merely a flesh wound and neither was the aftermath a minor issue, since the injury nearly ended his life and ended up getting him a medical discharge.  According to wellingtongoose's tumblr and LiveJournal articles, developing PTSD isn't grounds for a medical discharge, and neither are psychosomatic complaints.
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Last edited by kgreen20 (August 17, 2016 12:26 am)

Possibly a psychological assessment may also have ruled him out as a surgeon.
Or, he maybe chose himself to not have that kind of stress.
It seems to me that the first job opportunities that came up, he took.

Why?

Perhaps the bullet wound itself was not so serious, but bleeding out in the middle of the desert, in addition to the panicked attempt to staunch the bleeding by (I assume) Murray would have potentially brought all sorts of infections into the open wound. In which case, the bullet wound itself wouldn't have damaged him too badly, but to have been invalided home afterwards implies that it was infected and he got very sick as a result, requiring medical treatment elsewhere or leaving him in a state of exhaustion so much that he could not continue to fight. 
ACD's Watson caught typhoid fever in the hospital, which was the reason for his resulting weakened state and, thereafter, his discharge. Perhaps John's wound was so gravely infected that he had to be discharged, or he caught something in the base hospital as well. 

No, being a GP is a specialism in itself...
Some GPs do minor surgery..
I didn't know they had GPs in the army.
But John would possibly be qualified enough to do locum and maybe after so much locum work, taken on full time?
Or maybe he did a bit of GP work, before specialising, so he could go on to be an army doc.