How I Ended Up Working With Veterans Again
I left the Army to go to medical school and assumed that part of my life was behind me.
It wasn't.
Years later, medicine brought veterans back into my life in a very different way. By then I had spent years in clinical medicine. I had worked in South Carolina, returned to Michigan, and become deeply involved in pain management and addiction treatment.
Then my work took me to Alaska. That is where veteran disability medicine really began to take shape for me.
I started doing Compensation and Pension examinations as an independent physician contractor. At first glance, the work looked familiar. You interview a patient, review the medical records, examine them, and answer specific questions.
The deeper I got into it, though, the more I realized that disability medicine was its own kind of problem.
A veteran might tell you an injury happened thirty years ago. The service treatment record might describe it differently. A civilian physician fifteen years later might record another history. An MRI may show severe disease, but the question isn't simply whether the disease exists. The question may be whether it is related to service, whether another condition caused it, or whether a service-connected condition made it worse.
Those are different questions, and they require more than finding a diagnosis. They require reconstructing a medical history.
That part felt familiar. It reminded me of EMS. You walk into the middle of something and the pieces are scattered around you. Only now, instead of a living room or a roadside, the room was a claims file.
A service record from one decade. An MRI from another. A specialist note years later. A spouse's statement. A C&P examination. A medication history. Surgery. A later injury. A diagnosis that appeared long after the symptoms began.
And somewhere inside all of that, you are expected to answer a simple-sounding question: Is this related?
Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it is no, and sometimes the honest answer is that the evidence is not strong enough to say. That last one matters.
One of the most important things I learned doing this work is that the physician's job is not to make the claim work. The job is to make the medical reasoning work.
If the evidence supports the relationship, explain why. If it doesn't, explain why. If another cause fits better, say so. And if there is a piece of evidence that makes your preferred explanation uncomfortable, don't ignore it.
Deal with it.
I saw opinions that were too thin, conclusions with little explanation behind them, and cases where one sentence from the record was treated as if it outweighed everything else. I also saw how much difference a careful reconstruction of the medical history could make.
By 2022, I had reached a point where I decided to focus my professional work exclusively on veteran disability cases. It wasn't a destination I had planned decades earlier. I certainly didn't leave the Army thinking, "Someday I will spend my career reviewing disability claims."
Life rarely works that way.
Looking back, though, the pieces make sense. The Army gave me an understanding of military service from the inside. EMS taught me how to enter a confusing situation and begin sorting out what happened. Internal medicine taught me to look at the whole patient. Pain and addiction treatment taught me how disease, function, mood, sleep, medication, and daily life can become tangled together. C&P work brought those things into the veteran disability system.
Eventually, those threads became Valor Consulting.
Today, much of my work involves reviewing complicated medical histories for veterans and the attorneys who represent them. Some files are straightforward. Others are thousands of pages long. Some involve direct injuries, secondary conditions, aggravation, or years of conflicting records and competing explanations. Those are often the cases I find most interesting.
There is one part of the work that matters beyond the medical puzzle. These are not abstract files. They belong to people who served.
I know what it means to put on a uniform. That does not mean every claimed condition is related to service, and it shouldn't. An independent medical opinion still has to be independent. But it does mean I understand why getting the answer right matters.
Years ago, I thought leaving the Army meant that chapter of my life had closed. It turns out I was wrong.
I came back to veterans through medicine — just from the other side of the desk.