A retired Navy Seal and current Mercy Flight helicopter pilot is devoting his life to helping war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Haji Shareef’s career as a pilot began long before he joined the Mercy Flight team. After nine deployments, several being in the Middle East, Shareef transitioned to the Navy reserve. He began working with explosive detection dogs, where he was reconnected with people he served with.
The veterans were suffering from PTSD and looking for service dogs to ease their transition back into everyday life. At the time, Shareef did not train those types of dogs But in just four months, three of his fellow vets took their own lives.
Shareef founded Musketeer Canine LLC and PTSDogs 4 Vets. He rescues hunting dogs from all across the country and trains them as service dogs. He then gives them to veterans for absolutely no charge.
“The dogs that we get donated, it takes about 6 to 8 months to get them trained,” Shareef said. “That’s mainly because it takes about 2 to 3 months just for them to have the pure confidence and comfort in me taking them into weird places.”
Shareef says the training process for service dogs is much different than your average pet. All of the dogs that leave Shareef’s training program know how to help veterans deal with PTSD. The dogs wake people up from night terrors and block others from getting too close, for example.
On top of being the founder of his own company, Shareef is also a pilot with Mercy Flight, providing air transportation and medical care to all of Western New York. Saturday, Sept. 28 is the annual bash for Mercy Flight, raising money for its operation with every dollar going towards the organization.
“We largely provide our service with donations,” said Shareef. “There aren’t a lot of events in Buffalo where the whole purpose of it is literally to help the community.”
Combat-Related PTSD
Military veterans have struggled with PTSD and PTSD treatments almost since the first time armies took the field in. . .whenever that was. We do know that William Shakespeare captured the essence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Henry IV, Part I.
Lady Percy is very concerned about the mental state of her husband, Hotspur, who has just returned from a foreign war.
“O my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry’s bed?
Tell me, sweet lord, what is ‘t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy?”
These same words, minus ye olde English, could be heard in many houses of many returning private military contractors. PTSD symptoms like anger, depression, hypervigilance, and loss of interest make it almost impossible for PTSD victims to function at work, home, or anywhere else.
PTSD: The Injury
We will discuss PTSD treatments, including cutting-edge therapy, below. First, let’s discuss the nature of this misunderstood brain injury.
For many years, most doctors believed that PTSD was a processing disorder which randomly affected some combat veterans, but not others. For many years, most doctors believed roughly the same thing about schizophrenia. However, schizophrenia is a physical brain injury with a chemical cause, and so is PTSD.
Extreme stress alters brain chemistry. Combat stress and equivalent stress, like serious car crash stress, shrinks the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that controls logical responses. As a result, the amygdala (emotional responses) expands.
So, PTSD is a damaged brain that’s a lot like a damaged heart. You do not just “get over” PTSD or an enlarged heart. Both conditions usually require medical treatment and physical therapy. More on these things below.
Perhaps more importantly for our purposes, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a physical injury and therefore compensable under the Defense Base Act, and a Defense Base Act lawyer can obtain life-changing benefits.
PTSD Treatment
As mentioned, PTSD treatment usually requires a combination of medication and therapy. This combination varies according to each individual and is hard to establish.
Most PTSD drugs are anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs. These medicines address the symptoms of PTSD, but not the underlying cause. A few cause-treatment drugs are in the experimental/developmental stage. The most promising one is MDMA, a street drug known as molly or ecstasy. The Food and Drug Administration recently refused to approve one such drug, citing safety concerns.
Animal therapy is just one kind of therapy that often benefits PTSD patients. Art therapy is another example. Traditional one-one-one therapy helps PTSD victims identify and avoid triggers. Group therapy reminds PTSD victims that they are not alone.
Injury Compensation Available
Not all kinds of therapy work for all PTSD victims. So, the process is usually hit and miss. The same thing is true for PTSD drugs that treat symptoms but not causes. Not all PTSD victims have the same kinds of, and degree of, symptoms. Because of these hit-and-miss treatments, medical bills in PTSD cases are often abnormally high. As a result, insurance lawyers argue that they were not reasonably necessary.
“Reasonably necessary” is a lawyer phrase that means different things to different people. For example, insurance adjusters usually believe that “reasonably necessary” is synonymous with “cheapest available.” But in this context, this phrase usually covers all medical expenses in a deployment-related illness or injury case, such as:
- Transportation: These expenses usually aren’t very high in PTSD cases. But they’re usually through the roof in gunshot wound and other trauma injury cases. Generally, these injured contractors are stabilized at field hospitals then medevaced to larger offsite facilities. The transportation bill could be $20,000 or even two or three times larger.
- Emergency Care: Sometimes these expenses are high in PTSD cases. Untreated PTSD victims usually have suicidal thoughts. Once again, however, emergency care expenses are usually highest in trauma injury claims. Many seriously injured trauma victims require two or three rounds of surgery. They aren’t physically strong enough to take everything at once. Multiple procedures also inflate medical bills.
- Follow Up Care: These bills are usually higher in PTSD cases than in other kinds of trauma injury cases. Most PTSD victims don’t run to the doctor as soon as they get jumpy or nervous. Instead, they usually wait until their symptoms are advanced. At that point, doctors must watch them closely.
- Ancillary Costs: These expenses usually include prescription drugs and medical devices. Since a health insurance company usually pays most of the cost, most people don’t realize how expensive prescription drugs are. Drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs. To recoup these costs and make money, they charge astronomical prices.
- Physical Therapy: Brain injury physical therapy progress is hard to track. Victims may plateau for weeks or months and then suddenly experience breakthroughs. DBA lawyers advocate for victims in these situations as well. If the insurance company tries to pull the financial plug, a lawyer helps ensure that the money keeps flowing.
Maximum medical benefits are usually available even if a pre-existing or non-deployment condition contributed to the risk and/or severity of deployment-related PTSD.
For more information about DBA procedure, contact Barnett, Lerner, Karsen, Frankel & Castro, P.A.