Who turned the VA into Veteran's Adversary?

Was it President Bush, or Nicholson or the congress? Someone turned the VA into Veteran's Adversary instead of being there for them.

VA grapples with veterans' mental traumas
Washington Times - Washington,DC,USA
Audrey Hudson
Sunday, December 28, 2008

Service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq increasingly are suffering from mental trauma that dampens their homecomings, hobbles their re-entry into civilian life and imperils their continued military service - a situation the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has sought to address with treatment, counseling and even drug experimentation.

But even as the VA has worked to provide quality health care for millions of veterans at its facilities across the country, it has endured a series of failures - from not notifying test subjects about new drug warnings to ignoring safeguards during experiments. Those failures have damaged the reputation of the agency charged with supporting vulnerable veterans.

But it also has compromised the speedy recovery of those vets.

President-elect Barack Obama, who has named retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as incoming VA secretary, will have to deal with those long-standing discrepancies in the agency, as well as seek out new solutions to remedy the mental health problems plaguing an ever-growing population of veterans.

"Wars are supposed to end when the last shots are fired, but some of our new veterans will unfortunately have to cope with internal demons that may last their lifetime," said Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Chantix

Mr. Obama, Mr. Filner and other lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for an investigation into a smoking cessation study, which Mr. Peake immediately initiated.

The experiment tracked 240 veterans taking the drug Chantix to examine which forms of counseling were more beneficiary - smoking clinics or through a separate counselor. James Elliott, an Army infantryman who was wounded in Iraq, says the drug caused him to experience a mental breakdown and a showdown with police who used a Taser to subdue him in February.

Mr. Elliott said the VA didn't warn him about new FDA concerns that Chantix was linked to psychotic behavior and nearly 40 suicides until nearly a month after his disturbing incident occurred earlier this year.

The internal investigation confirmed that Mr. Elliott was not alone. It took medical professionals involved in the study anywhere from 16 to 134 days to notify participants taking Chantix about the new warnings.

RU-486

In addition, an experiment using 40 Gulf War veterans recruited from the Bronx Veterans Medical Research Foundation is testing the drug mifepristone, also known as RU-486, to treat chronic multisymptom illness. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to induce abortions by blocking progesterone that is needed to sustain pregnancies.

Diagnosis problem

Aimee Fitzgerald took her 74-year-old husband Joe to the VA hospital in the Bronx last year for diagnosis and treatment after he suddenly started losing motor skills. He was immediately admitted to the hospital, underwent some tests and was told that if he enrolled in a clinical study of Alzheimer's study he could be diagnosed quicker. When he declined, Mrs. Fitzgerald says her husband was immediately dismissed from the hospital without a diagnosis or treatment.
Less than a month later, Mr. Fitzgerald died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease.
After a review of the Fitzgerald case this year, the VA denied that the study recruitment efforts had anything to do with Mr. Fitzgerald's dismissal from the VA hospital.
However, Mr. Peake apologized to the family in an Aug. 26 letter to the editor at The Times.

No consent for tests

The VA halted all new experiments involving human subjects at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock this summer after an investigation by its inspector general.

Rampant violations in human experiments were uncovered, including missing consent forms, clandestine HIV testing and failure to report more than 100 deaths of veterans participating in various studies.

Entire consent forms were missing or signatures missing and research officials failed to obtain witness signatures in one study using veterans with dementia. Patients were tested for AIDS without their knowledge or permission.

In a review of several cancer studies involving 1,400 veterans, investigators randomly sampled the files of 105 patients and could only find 20 consent forms.

In West Virginia, several families of Iraq War veterans demanded a congressional investigation after their loved ones died at home in their sleep. All were taking medication for drugs described for post-traumatic stress disorder. click link above for the rest