Thanks, Chair. Thanks to the witnesses for coming today.
I think I'll take a little different light at it.
Colonel, my son's in the military, and was deployed over to Afghanistan and has come back. I'm retired from the RCMP so you will have to mind my answer to him when he came back. He came back and complained of some lower back pain. I basically told him to “suck it up, buttercup”, but I recognize it's more than that from the perspective that I don't think we recognize from time to time what our soldiers are doing overseas and the heavy load they do carry.
I wanted to carry on with the questions from Dr. Lunney who had been speaking about the chiropractic care, and it seems like it would be of benefit to the forces to look down that road. It certainly has helped many people.
From the perspective of that, and because you had mentioned in your opening remarks that you follow the primary care clinic model, that would mean to me anyway, coming from a community that follows the primary care model, that there is the potential to enlist those types of medicines that are not normally found within what we'll call the traditional model.
In terms of my question—and I know you can't answer it here today—but I believe there's some opportunity for the armed forces to consider such roles that are not normally found within the health care model. Could you speak to it a little more, especially certainly to those injuries that are not normally looked at from the perspective of chronic pain. When we look at back pain, we look at it from the perspective of a temporary issue as opposed to a long-term issue.
I know that's a difficult way of looking at it, but I guess the way I'm looking at it is from the perspective of primary health care. In my community all of the medical services are provided through one roof, through one funnel, and one of those is chiropractic. If that is the case is there the potential for the armed forces to do that as well?