Medicating the military

The saying goes, give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day but teach him how to fish and he'll eat everyday, or words like it but they are from a wise person looking past the need of the moment toward the need of the tomorrows.

Teach a man to medicate, he'll cope for a day. Teach him to heal and he'll live to an old age when you think about what needs to be done at the same time we see what is not being done now. They are given medications with no therapy and very little monitoring by a doctor. How do they expect to treat wounds with masking the pain? They are teaching them that no matter what pain they feel, they can kill it off with medications instead of addressing the cause of the pain in the first place.

Medicating the military

Use of psychiatric drugs has spiked; concerns surface about suicide, other dangers
By Andrew Tilghman and Brendan McGarry - Staff writers
Posted : Wednesday Mar 17, 2010 12:18:59 EDT

At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug.

And many troops are taking more than one kind, mixing several pills in daily “cocktails” — for example, an antidepressant with an antipsychotic to prevent nightmares, plus an anti-epileptic to reduce headaches — despite minimal clinical research testing such combinations.

The drugs come with serious side effects: They can impair motor skills, reduce reaction times and generally make a war fighter less effective. Some double the risk for suicide, prompting doctors — and Congress — to question whether these drugs are connected to the rising rate of military suicides.

“It’s really a large-scale experiment. We are experimenting with changing people’s cognition and behavior,” said Dr. Grace Jackson, a former Navy psychiatrist.

A Military Times investigation of electronic records obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency shows DLA spent $1.1 billion on common psychiatric and pain medications from 2001 to 2009. It also shows that use of psychiatric medications has increased dramatically — about 76 percent overall, with some drug types more than doubling — since the start of the current wars.
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Medicating the military