After conducting autopsies on US combat veterans who survived improvised explosive device (IED) blasts in Iraq and Afghanistan but later died of other causes, researchers in the US found the ex-soldiers had a unique type of brain injury.A more medical-jargoned piece here.
Described as a ‘distinctive honeycomb pattern of broken and swollen nerve fibres’, the injuries were not the same as those found in car crash and drug overdose victims, or sufferers of punch-drunk syndrome, which is caused by repeated blows to the head.
The lesions occurred in critical regions of the IED survivors’ brains, including in the frontal lobes, which control decision making and reasoning, lead the scientists to conclude that hidden brain injuries may play a role in the social and psychological problems faced by some combat veterans.
I suspect that you won't have to do much digging to find posts by the Keyboard Commandos which had disputed that those soldiers were truly injured. If you were to go back a century, you'd find the Fountain-Pen Brigade arguing that shell shock was a form of cowardice.
Now we know that those chairborne warriors were full of shit then and now. And we have a moral duty to care for the TBI sufferers. Regardless of the squawking of loons like former Senator Tom Coburn.
5 comments:
I just get furious over this - anyone who knew a soldier before a TBI and after knows by direct observation something's really gone wrong and a straight-forward comparison of their before n after performance testing would show it if any bothered to do such testing... but I've also argued for decades that any one who served in any branch must be covered 100% from the instant they sign up - and no exceptions for being kicked out or pre-existing... allowing exceptions give the weasles all the running room they need to fk over anyone endlessly.
The resistance among many to accepting logical conclusions is one of the great indicators of the decline of our culture.
Of COURSE the brain can be permanently damaged, just as the heart, the liver and any other organ can be. And of COURSE damage to the brain is going to manifest emotional and behavioral characteristics. If one can't arrive at that conclusion logically, I suspect it is because one has an agenda.
Just as of COURSE adding greenhouse gasses to a system causes the system to trap more heat. I remember learning about the greenhouse effect in high school physics class. To pretend such basic physics is not in play is the same kind of unwillingness to accept a basic set of facts one finds ideologically inconvenient. This type of behavior does not bode well for the near-term viability of our society...
Mikey, as noted in the Independent story, sometimes the Brits treated shell-shock cases by standing them in front of a firing party.
Now we know that those chairborne warriors were full of shit then and now. And we have a moral duty to care for the TBI sufferers.
A-freakin'-MEN
Don't say "Senator Tom Coburn" in mixed company. I' from his state, voted as early and often as I could to abort him, and there are still babies being born here without a brain!
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