Pulitzer Prize winning writer Eric Newhouse has been looking into this. “I’ve been deeply troubled about the lack of TBI diagnoses. Five years ago, the Rand Corporation interviewed several thousand soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and predicted that 18 percent of them would return with PTSD.” Newhouse is on a lecture circuit speaking about Middle East war issues, and health care for Veterans, and he is disturbed that more isn’t being done to help our Veterans.
For instance, there are multiple Centers of Excellence, sponsored by tax dollars that conduct research on Veterans with TBI or TBI symptoms. But they lack a unified approach and don’t share findings… unless the sharing includes publishing a paper in a journal and a free trip to Hawaii to present the paper at a conference full of researchers going in different diagnostic and protocol directions. [emphasis added]
NOTE: I don’t normally include latest news in my blog, but this is a GREAT article, albeit very scary in its truthfulness. Research has become an employment agency rarely concerned with finding cures, lest the funding dry up because the problem has been solved. On a global scale as an example, the success of the Roll Back Malaria program in the 60’s and 70’s led to the elimination of funding due to its “success.” Subsequently, arthropod (mosquito)-borne diseases have skyrocketed over the past 20-30 years. It is almost impossible for a new researcher with a novel idea to get NIH funding. The system doesn’t prize original thinking; it values the known researcher with a lab that just pumps out regurgitated papers.