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I'm a medic currently working in a BAS in the middle east and have been since last summer. Soldiers coming in with lower back/sacroiliac joint issues is a daily occurance with the majority of those patients running convoy missions for days and sometimes weeks on end. Acute problems center around muscular and neurological signs and symptoms that we usually treat with rest, pain medication and physical rehabilitation. There were also plenty of cases where soldiers with previous deployments would come in and complain that the back pain they felt during their first tour has been made worse this time around. Most of those patients had been through physical therapy and other treatments in between with mixed stories of success.
We try to do our best with these soldiers, but frankly, the body isn't designed to carry the amount of weight our gear amounts to. Some have argued, well, maybe these soldiers should do more PT and stretch and that would solve the problem. "If they were just in better shape!" Our sister BN had their medics come up with a mission stretching routine to be done during breaks in the route. Great idea and certainly not couter productive, but its not the golden ticket. We see soldiers of all shapes and sizes with the same problems.
Those are acute issues and I haven't read enough research on problems in the long term, but I would suspect this will be a problem our VA will be addressing in the next couple decades.
Milon
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