The Scandalous Treatment of America’s Wounded Warriors

Posted: May 21, 2007 

By Garth Nicolson, Ph.D.

In recent weeks we saw some semblance of remorse from our nation’s leaders over the conditions of our military hospitals, such as the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

But even with scandal after scandal over the last several years about the medical treatment of our military personnel and veterans and the facilities where they are treated, the American public and certainly the government cannot seem to focus on this issue as a blot on our nation’s promise to take care of its wounded warriors.

At Walter Reed, President Bush stated, “The problems at Walter Reed were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures.” However, these same failures have plagued our military and Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health systems long before this president came to office, and unless more people speak out about the problems it is doubtful that they will be fixed any time soon. The reason for this is that treatment of our military wounded and veterans, in particular, just does not receive high enough priority by the government bureaucracy and our mission-oriented military.

The long-term problems of military health were the focus of a recent session of a House Armed Services Subcommittee at which the acting surgeon general, Major General Gale Pollock — who had just been appointed after her predecessor, Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, was forced to retire over the Walter Reed scandal — testified that the military lacks the money to hire the medical staff needed to treat the (unplanned) thousands of wounded personnel coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same session, it was disclosed by the Government Accountability Office that the military and DVA health systems can’t even electronically communicate patient records with each other because of glitches in their computer systems, and that the problem of lost records still plagues both the military and DVA health systems.

In addition, the military and the DVA could not tell congressmen how many patients were treated with various medical procedures and what will be required to deal with the incoming wounded from overseas.

Representative Candice Miller stated, “We cannot allow those who have fought our foreign enemies in defense of our country to come home to fight the federal bureaucracy to get the health care they need.” Unfortunately, that is just what will be required to change a system that has never had the national priorities (or legions of lobbyists) compared to weapons and their platforms.

Once back home, wounded warriors find it difficult to get the care that they need. For example, head trauma cases are relegated to unequipped nursing homes that provide next to nothing because long-term rehabilitation is not available. Indeed, the “care” these veterans receive reportedly consists in large measure of psychiatric drugs that can create more brain damage.

The military is often quick to discharge active duty military patients to DVA care, and the DVA system is not equipped for the recent increase in completely incapacitated and long-term rehabilitation patients. The DVA is now running close to capacity, and the patients keep coming as the military tries to discharge their patients as soon as possible to DVA care.

Deeper Problems

The problems, however, go much deeper. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services fined a veterans’ hospital in Arizona for substandard care of World War II and Korean War veterans and threatened to pull its license. Patients had gone without required bed care and had been left in soiled bedclothes, nurses’ call buttons were ignored, and patients had burned their bedclothes with cigarettes because they weren’t being monitored.

Problems vary widely from state to state, often depending on how many Reserve and National Guard units have been deployed from a given state. This has caused a disproportionate number of personnel to come back wounded in some states, resulting in wide differences in disability payments between states with larger and smaller numbers of foreign deployed personnel. In some states like Illinois there is just not enough funding to take care of all the disabled veterans.

After the first Iraq war over 200,000 veterans were classified as medically incapacitated to various degrees, and tens of thousands died due to their wounds and other causes - even though the military only acknowledged 150 deaths during the conflict.

We worked on one of these problems, a friendly-fire problem with military vaccines and the chronic infections obtained from the vaccines and other sources that were ultimately transmitted to veterans’ immediate family members. Collectively, these problems came to be known as Gulf War Illness. The scope of these health issues were never acknowledged by the military or the DVA and their causes have been only partially addressed in the current conflicts. We will likely be seeing new casualties as a result of improper planning and even cover-ups of the experimental use of the same military vaccines used during the first Gulf War.

In addition, many veterans have been improperly diagnosed as having “post-traumatic stress disorder” and given psychotropic drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft to “manage” their symptoms. This did nothing, however, to alleviate their real medical problems and is another example of the misuse of psychiatric drugs to treat non-psychiatric conditions.

Some of the problems discussed above were detailed in the book Project Day Lily (www.projectdaylily.com), and it is obvious to me that these problems won’t go away any time soon. Unfortunately, little has changed at the top in the military and the DVA in terms of military health priorities since the first Gulf War.

Congress and the citizenry will have to take the lead in pressuring the Department of Defense and the DVA to change their attitudes about medical care for our wounded warriors and adequate funding for our disabled veterans.

The author is president, chief scientific officer and research professor at the Institute for Molecular Medicine (www.immed.org) in Huntington Beach, California. He is also an Honorary Colonel of the U.S. Army Special Forces and an Honorary Navy SEAL due to his work on veterans’ illnesses. He co-authored Project Day Lily with his wife, Dr. Nancy Nicolson.

For more on Gulf War Illness and veterans’ health issues, check out these previous articles and items:

“Ill Wind: Desert Storm Blows Back with a Fury” (2003)

“Victory Over Toxins” (2003)

“Desert Storm: Deadlier than Vietnam?” (2003)

“A Mounting Death Toll: Recalculating the ‘Least Costly War’” (2003)

“On the Trail of Toxic Terror” (2003)

“Gulf War Illness: What Some of the Experts Say” (2003)

“A Family Battles for Survival” (2003)

“‘An Unbelievable Dereliction’” (2003)

“The Psychiatric ‘Funnel System’” (2003)

“Drug ‘Treatments’ Exacerbate Problems” (2003)

“Gulf War Illness Suffering Continues” (1998)

“Lives in the Balance” (1996)

“The Bug that Bit the President” (1996)

Freedom’s investigation into Gulf War Illness and related issues is continuing.  Your information is important to us.

We therefore welcome your views and information regarding any of the above articles and items.  Please e-mail your comments or data to editor@freedommag.org or mail them to Editor, Freedom Magazine, 6331 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 1200, Los Angeles, CA 90028.