Soldiers can take it - a conceptual analysis of trauma.

PURPOSE This article will analyze the concept of trauma, and illustrate distinctions between accepted definitions and actual meaning. For populations at high risk for exposure to traumatic situations, such as Special Operations Forces (SOF) and deployed military personnel, delineating the beliefs and environment-specific comprehension of trauma and its consequences is imperative. BACKGROUND Trauma is a common term in health sciences literature and in the social vernacular, but is often misunderstood and lacks specificity. Differences in perception of what trauma is and is not may exist even between civilian and military populations. Therefore, the concept of trauma warrants clarification, to define the terminology and to use it appropriately with full understanding. DATA SOURCES EbscoHost, PubMed, CINAHL, MedLine, and Google Scholar. Only English-language results were accepted, and were limited to publications from the dates of 1975-2010.