Plastic Surgery To Pass The Army Physical

I had my struggles with the military about weight requirements.  Many have.  I remember an especially clever nurse-officer who had given a lot more years of her existence to the Army than I had, and was both a cracker jack clinician and a cracker jack administrator, and left with a wimp because she was too heavy.

I also remember one whom I then considered a mediocre physician’s assistant who told me he got a commission as a warrant officer where the physical consisted mainly of measuring the circumference of both his neck and his waist. He did it by pumping up his muscles in his neck so that his neck was so damned fat that the rest of him seemed “proportional.”  Yes, this really worked.  Waist not — want not.

In case anybody is curious about my military commission physical, I had starved myself to some pretty small proportions.  The physician told me I was built like a fashion model, so as much as he would surely enjoy it, he was not going to insult me by giving me a physical.

The Army has many problems with many of their systems, but the overall problem that is plaguing modern society is something called “norming.”

Although I remember my early years of conceiving medicine as a sacred art, I remember my clinical trial years as devoted to finding what worked most cheaply and easily for the biggest number of people.  Nobody (except maybe me) appeared to be wondering a lot about those for whom something didn’t work, and what would become of those precious, fascinating few.  I was taught in French medical school that each individual patient ought to be treated as if they were a research project.  In America – you are all one big statistical mass, and we strive to find a one-size-fits all solution that probably doesn’t really fit any one person very well.

America certainly seems to need a military. After all, look how many wars we have been fighting in just this century alone — And even several at the same time! Reasons for people choosing to join the military always amazed me.  They ranged from an inability to get employed in other sectors, to family traditions of service that went back generations to the Civil War or sometimes even the American Revolution.

I will admit to having had a little in the way of employability problems at the time (my neurosurgical residency program folded on me) but mostly I had a lot of wide-eyed fanatical patriotism, from a grandmother of blessed memory who had told me that the United States was the only place she could go when she got run out of  Russia for the sin of being Jewish (Israel hadn’t been invented yet).

Unbelievably, I was in the military during a brief (and fortuitous) sliver of peacetime. One can only imagine what such an august institution would have done with me otherwise.  I was told that the instution worked more efficiently during wartime, because that was what it was made for.  Peacetime was, I was told, the genesis of television series such as Sergeant Bilko.

When you need guys really badly to go out there and fight the enemy, it is certainly more difficult to imagine eliminating people because of their dimensions on a tape measure.  Of course, my father was eliminated from the WWII draft because of flat feet, something for which my grandmother of blessed memory offered endless thanks to the deity.

Norming —  quick, quantitative way to determine who is fit and who is not.  Not that it has any relevance to who really is “good” at this strange profession.

The only criterion I know for sure is that it is a fairly sure bet that military types who opt for plastic surgery to meet such standards are seeking medical care outside the military, which I believe has generally been considered a punishable offense — even a court marshal.  The guys who are going for plastic surgery to meet these stupid requirements have ambition, a desire to advance in rank, and perhaps other attributes less evident.  Tut there is no mention of them getting court martialed, so my guess is that they know how to shut up.

I once helped a guy, using “natural” treatments, get off a pain pill addiction which seemed to have been sanctioned by military care.  He was doing wonderful and most of the job was done, when he actually told the military what was going on.  He phoned me to say treatment was over, and ended up in the brig.  He could not access either his pain pills or my treatment, which is definitely the hard way to detox.

It ought to be no surprise that military situations do not generally reward original thought.  As a matter of fact, it is like a treadmill, going through carefully directed hoops in order to achieve rank, raises in pay grade, and the like.

My stories are about the Army.  The story I quoted was about the Marines.  It was not difficult to find a similar story about the Air Force.

Here is a wonderful analysis of why the criterion should be discarded, focusing on some of the great military men of our time who could have been drummed out this way.

Military is generally a pretty sill bureaucracy, relying on tradition and lack of change as if they were virtues.

Other countries seem willing to review and adapt standards.  I don’t know how much difference it would make with our folks, but the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology (CSEP) is at least willing to look at such things.

British folks looking at body measures and health indices suggest a simple waist to height ratio –keeping your waist size under half your height.

As usual, the American Military shoots itself in the foot.

Almost anything would be an improvement; de-emphasizing the importance of these measurements  relative to other fitness tasks; anything, really, and there is nothing done, really, except these strange measurements — the origin of which I cannot find, maybe shrouded in Civil War procedure or something.

Proud to be American?  Maybe  I know we can be a lot more than we have been recently.

Proud to be an American Veteran?  I’ve got to see both active duty service-people and veterans treated better, first.