Military Applications of Behavioral Medicine

Abstract

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), under the auspices of which this conference on behavioral medicine was held, represents a group of nations that have united together to form a common determent and defense against military invasion from Warsaw Pact nations. Much of the research described at this conference would be useful in treating victims of combat between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces, most notably those victims who have developed physical signs and symptoms that are mediated directly by anxiety accruing from poor adjustment to combat environments, or physical illnesses and injuries that are aggravated by impaired psychological adjustment to combat stress. Combat casualties of psychogenic origin have become substantially more prevalent recently compared to earlier periods of armed conflict. Official records show that during World War II, such casualties accounted for about one per cent of total casualties among Navy and Marine Corps personnel, while during the Vietnam Conflict, over seven per cent of the total Navy and Marine Corps casualties involved some form of psychological disturbance (Hoiberg & Gunderson, Note 1). Recent findings show that resistance to infectious diseases may also be impaired by psychological stress (Keller et al., 1981), indicating that these previous casualty statistics for psychogenically-mediated disorders may be inordinately conservative (i. e., the data of Hoiberg and Gunderson show that over nine per cent of the total Navy and Marine Corps casualties during the Vietnam Conflict were attributed directly to infectious diseases).