By Terri Moon Cronk
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Sept. 13, 2013 – The Military Health System
acknowledges that U.S. troops in previous conflicts haven’t been
subjected to the circumstances that surround 12 years of war in Iraq and
Afghanistan, a senior Defense Department physician said here yesterday
during a panel discussion at a warrior-family symposium.
Dr. James Kelly, director of the Defense Department’s National
Intrepid Center of Excellence, talked about his center’s advancements in
post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury – signature
wounds from the wars - in a panel discussion titled, “Innovative Mental
Health Solutions – Today and Tomorrow.”
The annual symposium is
sponsored by the Military Officers Association of America and the
National Defense Industrial Association.
Kelly cited problems
that stem from the pattern of repeated deployments and training between
deployments, combined with an all-volunteer force composed of members
put themselves in harm’s way time and time again. “It is not the pattern
we’ve previously had in our military,” he said.
The idea that
the younger generation is somehow softer or in some ways more vulnerable
doesn’t hold water, Kelly said. “These people are tough as nails,” he
said to a round of applause from hundreds of audience members.
“What we need to do is innovate, look more in depth, and understand them
as people and individuals that have been engaged in ways [for which] we
simply have no good track record to point to and say, ‘Here’s what this
is about, and here’s what to do about it,’” he said.
Kelly said
he and his staff learn as they go at the center, conducting research and
treating service members in an intensive four-week program.
In a
previous interview with American Forces Press Service, Kelly explained
that when service members with severe traumatic brain injury do not
respond to conventional medical treatment, they can be referred to the
National Intrepid Center of Excellence, but they must also have a
co-existing psychological health issue, such as post-traumatic stress
disorder, depression or anxiety.
Kelly became NICoE’s director
five years ago. The center got underway when Defense Department
officials invited him -- a former neurology consultant for the Chicago
Bears football team -- to join a group of doctors to examine how to
treat service members who were exposed to blast injuries and other head
trauma.
He and the other doctors were “willing volunteers” drawn
to military health care and working with service members coming back
from both wars because of blast-related injuries and a variety of other
causes of concussions, Kelly said.
The need for innovation in
research and in treating service members led to a concept of using
“virtual reality war,” with service members are immersed in a setting
with a vision of what happens when they’re inside a Humvee going down a
road. The seat begins to vibrate as a bomb goes off, and the smell of
burning rubber wafts into the vehicle. The hope, Kelly explained, is
that while the service members are in a safe clinic setting, the
experience can help them get past the traumatic events they brought back
from deployments.
This use of virtual reality shows quantifiable
metabolic changes deep inside the brain when it’s dealing with stress,
Kelly said.
“That’s just one of the examples of the kinds of
things that we’re engaged in that is really novel, innovative,” he
added. “[It] bridges into areas of the mind … in ways that traditional
medicine -- certainly traditional neurology -- hadn’t previously.”
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