We've had a decade plus of two occupations with many soldiers being deployed into these theaters more then once and many with immediate families waiting at home. Thousands have been National Guard and Reserve units who are not coming from military bases but communities, many rural, from around the Country. Many of the regular Military, on discharge from, move to area's far from the care they may seek.
Physicians and other health-care providers are the first line of professionals who treat individuals and families who may have issues related to military deployment. Former Congressman Brian Baird says that medical education should include mandatory training in related issues.
May 18, 2011 - EVEN as a federal Court of Appeals ruled recently that Veterans Affairs care for veterans is inadequate, a possibly greater gap in care for service members has gone completely unrecognized.
In the past decade, approximately 2 million American military and civilian personnel have deployed to combat areas. Those individuals, plus their family members, face unique physical, emotional and economic challenges that can have lasting, potentially lethal, impacts.
If any other health-care condition affected so many and carried such serious potential risks, one would expect our academic and public-health institutions to pull out all the stops to ensure proper diagnosis and treatment. Nothing of the sort has happened.
In fact, the majority of our leading medical schools and other health-training programs provide no mandatory or even elective course work relating specifically to military service or deployment issues. As a colleague in Congress said when I asked about his own medical training, "I took course work on all sorts of diseases I'll never see in my career, but I never had a single class or even a chapter on military culture or combat deployment." {continued}
This needed training, should have started decades back, will also help in the treatment of the the non-military and veteran much greater portion of the society as the wounds of our wars, physical and mental, have always advanced medical treatments due to the uniqueness and rapid numbers of if the civilian sectors pay attention which in many cases they haven't after our wars of choice!
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