 Beyond its primary mission of national defense, the United States military has long served as a laboratory for social change. President Truman’s courageous decision in 1948 to desegregate the military set into motion changes that have reverberated through our society ever since. For many years, I lived and worked in southeastern Virginia, a region with many military bases and hundreds of thousands of veterans. It was clear that institutional support for racial equality within the military had played a pivotal role in speeding the breakup of centuries-long patterns of prejudice and discrimination. Later policy changes mandating that women in the military be judged on merit rather than gender have expanded this model of nondiscrimination. Problems still exist but there has been great progress.
The military is currently incorporating other changes that also have the capacity to spread through society as a whole. Without seeking to equate discrimination against chiropractors with the horrors of racial, ethnic, or gender discrimination, I believe it is fair to say that all represent forms of injustice.
In the past decade, Department of Defense (DOD) and Veterans Administration (VA) medical systems, bowing to sustained pressure from Congress, have gradually put into practice new policies that reverse longstanding discriminatory rules under which chiropractors were excluded from participation in the health care delivery systems for veterans and active duty members of the Armed Forces.
 Moreover, President-elect Obama, in three detailed letters (link, link, link) to the American Chiropractic Association in 2008, has endorsed fuller inclusion and integration of chiropractic into the health care provided by the DOD, VA, Medicare, the U.S. Public Health Service and any expanded national health program enacted by his administration and the new Congress.
Leaders in a Time of Transition
In this issue of Health Insights Today, we highlight the ways that the DOD and the VA are moving to integrate chiropractic and acupuncture into their health care systems. I recently interviewed two doctors whose leadership in this transition is helping pave the way for broader changes in the coming years.
Chip Gowan, DC, is the full-time staff chiropractor at the Kansas City Veterans Administration Hospital, where he has developed a program where selected student interns from Cleveland Chiropractic College–Kansas City participate in rotations as part of their education. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD, MPH, practices acupuncture full-time at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, while also seeing patients at the Pentagon and Walter Reed Army Medical Center and serving on-call with the medical team at the White House. Drs. Gowan and Niemtzow are doctors that future members of their professions will remember as trailblazers. The same can certainly be said of Bill Morgan, DC, the chiropractor at the National Naval Medical Center interviewed in our inaugural issue.
Another example of the military’s increasing openness to new approaches is the recent grant of over $400,000 to the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) by the newly formed Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, to study the effectiveness of a comprehensive, non-drug approach to treating posttraumatic stress disorder and major depression with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and their families. The CMBM model includes mind-body approaches (meditation, guided imagery, biofeedback, and yoga) and self-expression in words, drawings, and movement, in supportive, educational small groups. |
