Thank you, Chair, for the consideration.
I apologize for being away while you were speaking, sir.
I once went to a fascinating lecture by an emergency room physician from New York who was lecturing a bunch of U.S. state governors and Canadian premiers about evidence-based medicine. He talked about how evidence-based medicine killed George Washington, because at the time bloodletting was considered to be an appropriate therapy.
He then went through a whole bunch of routine therapies that are given by the medical profession and he disaggregated the evidence on whether or not they worked. That went from mammograms to prostate...the whole routine, and basically it was a bit of an eye-opener for me as a politician, with no medical background, that some of this evidence base is something less than full empirical evidence.
When our previous witness reacted rather strongly to evidence, he reacted as a lay person would react, saying, “Well, I don't know about evidence, but I know that this works for me.”
I apologize if this has already been covered, but if a number of your soldiers are saying that this is really working for them, what are the forces doing to develop an empirical metric that may actually result in this becoming an appropriate therapy, or not, as the case may be? I don't understand.