Department of Disqualified: Fixing the Broken Military Medical Accessions Process
Joe Schuman
November 20, 2018
If discontent is the first necessity of progress, then the military medical accessions process — by which recruits are medically evaluated for military service — is ready for improvement. With 59 percent of Americans medically ineligible to join and tens of thousands of applicants medically rejected every year, there is plenty of discontent. I would know. I was one such disgruntled applicant.
I started applying to Army Officer Candidate School in October 2015 as a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After seven months of navigating the medical accessions process, I was medically rejected from the Army on account of congenital scoliosis and a medical history of spinal fusion surgeries. Neither my career as a Division III Varsity soccer player nor a letter from my surgeon — a retired Army doctor and chief of orthopedic surgery — noting that I had “no limitations whatsoever†had any impact on my medical evaluation. After switching my application to the Navy the following spring, I was medically rejected again. Finally, after one last medical rejection from the Army National Guard in the summer of 2016, I gave up on my dream of serving my country in uniform.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/11/department-of-disqualified-fixing-the-broken-military-medical-accessions-process/
