Still Dying Under the Army's Care

Medicine is great to reduce pain when you are hurting but medicine for the rest of your life is not a good thing when you are in pain and no one is stopping the cause of the pain. If you have a bullet wound, you wouldn't want someone to tell you to pop a pill while they plan on leaving the bullet in and let the wound just bleed. So how is killing off pain but not going after the cause of it doing anyone any good? This is what a lot of veterans complain about. Medication is easy to give but therapy is harder to provide, so it is not done nearly as much as they need to. Numb them up with pills and then complain because they are using them more than they should seems idiotic just as complaining about them using street drugs to feel better when medications they are given make them feel worse.

Army downplays story on WTU at Fort Carson

Survey: 90 percent 'satisfied' with level of care
By Jeff Schogol, Stars and StripesStars and Stripes online edition, Monday, April 26, 2010
RELATED STORY: Pentagon Wounded Warrior care official forced out
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Army on Monday played down a New York Times story that found problems with a Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Carson, Colo., saying it wasn’t an accurate reflection of overall care there.
The story, published Saturday, painted a bleak picture of troops receiving little therapy, being prescribed various medications that leave them disoriented or addicted, and enduring harsh treatment from noncommissioned officers.
Some of the soldiers swap medications with their comrades and others try heroin, which is readily available, according to the newspaper.
Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker said the Times’ story focused on a “select number of soldiers and families that were encountering problems,” and does not reflect the majority of soldiers in care.
read more here
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69619

But as a refresher so that we all remember this has been going on for a long time, here's a story from 2008 and what happened to a medicated solider instead of a treated one.

Dying Under the Army's Care
By MARK THOMPSON Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008


Iraqi insurgents wounded Gerald Cassidy in the deafening blast of a roadside bomb just outside Baghdad on Aug. 28, 2006. But it took more than a year for him to die from neglect by the Army that had sent him off to war. When Cassidy returned to the U.S. last April, the Army shipped him to a hospital in Fort Knox, Ky., to get treatment for the excruciating headaches that had accompanied him home. For five months, he made the rounds of Army medical personnel, who couldn't cure a pain that grew steadily worse. Unable to make room for him in a pain-management clinic, the Army increasingly plied him with drugs to dull the torment.

At summer's end, the headaches had grown so intense that Cassidy pleaded once more for help, and his doctor prescribed methadone, a powerful narcotic. The next day, calls to Cassidy's cell phone from his wife Melissa went unanswered. After two more days without word from her husband, she frantically called the Army and urged that someone check on him. Nine hours later, two soldiers finally unlocked the door to his room. They found Cassidy slumped in his chair, dead, his laptop and cold takeout chicken wings on his desk.

The "manner of death" was summed up at the end of the 12-page autopsy: "Accident." But when he died, Cassidy had the contents of a locked medicine cabinet coursing through his body, powerful narcotics and other drugs like citalopram, hydromorphine, morphine and oxycodone, as well as methadone. The drugs--both the levels that Cassidy took and "their combined, synergistic actions," in the medical examiner's words--killed him.



Read more: Dying Under the Army's Care